It is our duty to force all mankind to accept the seven Noahide laws, and if not ~ they will be killed." ~ Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg

Sunday, 5 August 2012

BELLA DODD: SCHOOL OF DARKNESS: CH 8 ~11

CHAPTER
EIGHT

From
1936 to 1938 I was involved in so many activities I had little time for my
family and old friends. I devoted myself more and more to the new friends who
shared my fanatical sense of dedication. I found little time to read anything
except Party literature.

This
was necessary to hold leadership in a union where many of the leaders were
trained and established Communists.

The
Teachers Union was growing rapidly in numbers and influence. The college
teachers in the Union grew so numerous that a separate local with a separate
office was established for them, Local537. Together with the WPA Local Number
453, our membership grew to almost nine thousand and we extended control to
many upstate locals. At its peak the Union boasted ten thousand members, and in
it the Communist Party had a fraction of close to a thousand. Among them were
Moscow-trained teachers and men and women who had attended the sixth World
Congress of the Comintern.

The
president of the Union, Charles J. Hendley, a history teacher at George
Washington High School, was not a Communist. He was a militant socialist and
did not join the Communist Party until he retired from the school system. He
then became associated with the Daily Worker. He was, however, willing
to join with the Communists in the many and varied campaigns of the Teachers
Union and of the labor movement generally.

He
grew to like many of the Communist Party leaders in the Union and that tended
to minimize political differences. He was a lonely man; the Union and its
leadership were his family and his social life.

The
Party left nothing to chance. When in 1936 Lefkowitz and Linville left the
Teachers Union because the Communists had control, the Party immediately
suggested a candidate for office manager, and Dorothy Wallas, a brassy and
pleasant blonde, was placed there to insure Party control, and especially
control of the president.

Mr.
Hendley carried a full program as a teacher and had little time to give to
office detail, but the efficient Miss Wallas was always at hand. He grew fond
of her and relied more and more on her judgment, not knowing, of course, that
she was a Party member. Miss Wallas meantime used her position as palace
favorite to run the office as she saw fit, and, since Mr. Hendley was at school
all day, she began to make important decisions.

I
was seldom in the Union office. I was at Albany, or out of town organizing, or
at City Hall, or at the Board of Education. But to be effective in the Union I
found I had to give some consideration to the inner-office politics and I soon
learned that Miss Wallas was an inner wheel functioning smoothly.

She
and I did not clash because I did not want a road block in my relations with
Mr. Hendley. As I had often heard her criticize the Communists, I was convinced
that she was not one.

There
was another group at the office, a rigidly communist puritanical group,
old-time leaders of the fraction. The thirty or so who made up this group had
known each other for years. They had led the struggle against Linville and
Lefkowitz. Some had the blessings of Moscow and they were a sort of élite
corps, disciplined and unbending except when the Party spoke.

There
was a subtle struggle for leadership between this inner core and myself. My
strength in any controversy lay in the fact that the Party was using me in
labor, legislative, and peace campaigns and that I was used in key positions in
labor politics.

This
gave me prestige which I used to keep the life of the Union from freezing into
a rigid communist pattern. I deferred to them often, however, and was firm only
when it came to Union policy on the economic interests of the teachers and the
need to gain political respect for the Union.

The
Party literature of the period was stressing the increasing importance of
united fronts for peace, against fascism, against discrimination, against
economic insecurity. Earl Browder and other Party leaders were warning Union
leaders not to regard Marxism as dogmatic, but as flexible in meeting new
situations. As a matter of fact, this literature sometimes seemed a handicap,
cluttered as it was with double talk used purposely by Marx and Lenin. Browder
emphasized the importance of relying on Stalin who was building socialism in
Russia, and only on Stalin because of his shrewdness in dealing with all, even
with enemies of the working class, such as English and American capitalists.

We
who were the leaders of the united-front period used to shake our heads at the
old guard in the Union and scornfully call them Nineteen Fivers, referring to the
Russian Revolution of 1905.

Yet
I see now that this old guard with its endless disputation gave stability to
Party control of our Union. It was their whole life; few got anything for their
endless hours of work except the right to control. They were dour people
though, and some of them, such as Celia Lewis and Clara Rieber, were so dedicated
that they were intolerant of anyone’s opinions except the opinions of those on
their side. I never saw them laugh and I doubt if they knew how.

We
had one man in the Union who was so talented in manipulation that he was
regarded as the Stalin of the Union ~ Dale Zysman, also known as Jack Hardy. He
had been to Moscow. He had written The First American Revolution, thus
implying that a greater one was to come. A junior high school teacher, he was a
tall, personable young man with a keen interest in baseball and he held his
pipe in his mouth at exactly the angle Stalin did his.

The
communist fraction had installed him officially as vice-president of the
Teachers Union and also unofficially as the arbiter in all disputes between
Party members and groups. He also established contacts with non-Party
personalities for possible work in the Union. It was he who tried to give the
Union Executive Board a well-balanced appearance by persuading Protestant and
Catholic teachers to accept posts on the Board where most of the members were
communist atheists.

Dale
also maintained an espionage system which brought back information on what was going
on in the Union as well as in the inner circles of other teachers’
organizations. Those who worked in this espionage system, particularly in other
left-wing groups, became twisted personalities. Dale, I learned later, reported
directly to “Chester,” a man I was to know as the chief of the Party’s
intelligence service.

Later
I ran into a real problem with Dale and our blond office manager. Dorothy was making
my position with Mr. Hendley difficult by spreading false stories about me. I
could not spend hours in the office just to counteract office intrigue. I got
nowhere when I took the matter to Dale.

But
one day two bookkeepers brought me evidence of financial irregularities. They
did not want to take it to Mr.Hendley because Miss Wallas was involved. I took
this up with Dale and got a brush-off. Then one day the mystery cleared.

We
learned that Miss Wallas was not only a good Communist but that she was also
Dale’s sister! It explained much, and I thought it should be taken up with the
leaders of the fraction. But when I stated my discovery and looked at Celia and
Clara and the others to get their reactions it was clear from their faces they
had known it all the time. I was the one kept in the dark. Miss Wallas was soon
afterward sent elsewhere and I was free to carry on my work; but for some time
I was unnerved by this duplicity.

Attending
conventions took much of my time. No convention of teachers in the United States
ever went unnoticed by the Communist Party. The national office would call the
leaders of the teacher Communists and discuss with us the nature of the
organization and inquire if we had Party members in it.

If
we had, we would decide which resolutions they were to introduce and which they
were to oppose. If we had no members, observers would be sent to make contacts.
Particular attention was given to pushing federal aid to the public-education
program and to the issue of separation of church and state at these
conventions.

We
also carefully prepared for meetings of learned societies, such as mathematics
and modern language associations, and those composed of professors of physics,
history, and social studies. A careful search of Party members and friends of
the Party was made, as well as of liberals and special interest groups. This
was all done months in advance. Then a campaign began to get certain people
elected or to have them volunteer to go to a convention so that we would have a
core of dependables.

Finally
we drew up a plan of action to put through certain measures and to try to
defeat others.

We
felt it was important at these meetings of learned societies to defeat
everything which did not conform to Marxist ideology. The result was that the
ideology of many of our learned societies has within the last thirty years been
deeply affected. The Communists establish a fraction in such societies and
whenever possible a leadership for a materialistic, collectivistic,
international class-struggle approach.

The
conventions were invaluable in bringing together the growing group of scholars
who were not members of the Party but who followed Marxist ideology
idealistically. For the strength of the Party was increasing in high positions;
and job getting and job promotions are a sine qua non of academic
gatherings.

Men
are drawn where power is, and these academic men were no different in that respect
from traveling salesmen. The Party and its friends were assiduous in developing
the job-getting and job-giving phase of these meetings.

At
the end of a convention they returned with lists of new conquests, the names of
men and women who would go along with us. These names were given to the
district organizer of the Party in the locality where each professor lived. The
organizer would visit and try to deepen the ideological conquest by flattering
his victim, disclosing to him new vistas of usefulness, and by introducing him to
an interesting social life. The methods were many; the end was one ~ a closer
tie to the Party.

Before
long a professor would become involved in the proletarian class struggle. His name
would then be used to support communist public declaration on national or
international policies.

Soon
the professor identified himself with a “side,” and all the good people were on
his side and all the greedy, the degraded, the stupid were on the other.

Soon
he began talking of “our people” and thinking himself part of an unnumbered
army of justice marching to a brave new world, or, as one French intellectual
Communist, who lost his life in the Resistance, put it, toward “singing
tomorrows.”

American
Federation of Teachers conventions were held during the summer months so teacher
delegates could attend without having to leave their classes or to get special
permission. This Federation was unique in American education in that it was the
only teachers’ association organized on a union basis.

The
history of the plan for affiliating teachers with labor is interesting.

It
was first tried in 1902in San Antonio where a charter was issued directly by
the A.F. of L. Later the same year the Chicago Teachers Federation, organized
in 1897, affiliated itself with the Chicago Federation of Labor to get labor
support for a salary fight with the “vested interests.” Many prominent
Chicagoans, among them Jane Addams, urged the teachers to affiliate with labor.

A
debate raged in educational periodicals as to the advisability of teachers
unionizing, a debate which has gone on ever since. By 1916 twenty teachers’
organizations in ten different states had affiliated with labor. Some were
short-lived, due to local suppression, or to loss of interest, after the
immediate objective was won.

In
1916 a call was issued by the Chicago Teachers Union to all locals affiliated
with labor. A meeting was held and the American Federation of Teachers, a
national organization, was founded. The next month it affiliated with the A.F.
of L. with eight charter locals in Chicago, Gary, New York City, Scranton, and
Washington, D.C., with a combined membership of twenty-eight hundred.

The
American Teacher, a magazine published by a group of individuals in the New
York union, was endorsed as the official publication. At first hostile,
boards of education exercised pressure against the new teachers’ organization,
but by 1920 there were one hundred and forty locals and a membership of twelve
thousand.

The
American Federation of Teachers in the beginning was sparked by socialists. Its
growth was due to the antiwar principles of the American socialists, for there
was need of an organization to help teachers involved in the anti-war struggle.
Even then most of the members were not socialists but were attracted by the
Federation program for economic and social aid. By 1927 the Federation had
declined in membership and prestige because of attacks on organized labor. With
the coming of the depression it again began to grow and by 1934 there were
seventy-five locals in good standing with an active membership of almost ten
thousand.

By
that time the Communists were displacing the socialists from posts of radical
leadership in unions. The steady march of the Communists into the Federation at
this period was planned and not accidental. Since twenty-five teachers could
form a local and send delegates to the national convention, the communist
district organizers began promoting the organizing of teachers, and these began
to send delegates, often charming and persuasive ones.

Many
of the teachers were not interested in the political struggle in the Federation
and did not care to go as delegates. Even in the New York local in my time it
was difficult to get non-Party people to go as delegates because the Federation
did not pay expenses. But the keenest competition existed among Party members.
The communist faction within the Federation drew up its list carefully and it
was considered a mark of honor for Party members or fellow travelers to be
selected.

Of
course, from 1936 to 1938 our delegation from Local 5 to Federation conventions
had to be divided between the communist group which was in control and the
opposition which consisted of socialist splinter groups. The struggle between
these groups was carried to the national conventions, often to the
consternation of the political innocents who still believed that all American
politics was ruled by the Republican and the Democratic parties. They could not
understand the bitterness, the vituperation, and sometimes the terror which
their colleagues exhibited. But one fact was clear to others: the conventions
of the Federation became battles for the capture of the minds and the votes of
the independent delegates.

My
first federation convention was in Philadelphia in 1936. Since it was close to
New York City, we were able to send a full quota of delegates while many of the
out-of-town locals were forced to send only token representation. To make
matters worse we had impressed on the members of the New York fraction that
even if they were not delegates they would be needed to entertain and lobby
with delegates from other sections.

We
were so well organized that we were in almost complete control. The
arrangements were in the hands of the Philadelphia local, itself communist led and
controlled. The party assigned its ablest trades-union functionaries to hold
continuous secret sessions in a room at the convention hotel to aid comrades on
all questions.

If
I had not yet been convinced that the road to progress was the one pointed out
by the Communists, I was certainly overwhelmed by the sense of power which this
convention manifested. To it came professors whose names I had read in academic
literature and in the press.

There
was a wide range of delegates, from university men and women of distinction and
old-time classroom teachers with the staid dignity that seemed so much a part
of the profession in America to the young substitute and unemployed teachers
who eyed their situation with economic fear and political and philosophical
defiance. There was also the WPA troop, an assortment of men and women who were
called teachers but many of whom had been shifted into this category because
they were on relief, or had a college education, or some talent that allowed
them to be called teachers, such as teaching tap dancing or hairdressing.

A
great leveling process was at work in American life and at that time it seemed
to me a good thing. So it also seemed to the Communist Party, but for a
different reason. This professional leveling would fit teachers better into its
class-struggle philosophy and so bring them to identify themselves with the
proletariat.

At
the convention were various interesting personalities: neat, quiet Albert
Blumberg from Johns Hopkins University, the shrewdest communist agent in the
Federation; Jerome Davis, just fired from the Yale Divinity School, thrown out,
we were told, because he had dared promote a strike of student cafeteria
workers; Mary Foley Crossman, president of the Philadelphia local, a fine and able
woman; Miss Allie Mann, a good parliamentarian and charming woman from the
largest Southern local of Atlanta, and one of the noncommunist leaders.

The
convention was entirely swallowed up by the Communists. They passed every resolution
they wanted and I began to feel that we had enough votes to pass a resolution
for a Soviet America.

Jerome
Davis was elected president of the Federation and his cause became the rallying
point around which we fought during the next year. The fight for his
reinstatement at Yale also became a Teachers Union cause.

The
college division of the Federation voted to picket Yale and I was elected to a
committee to negotiate with the Yale Corporation for his reinstatement. We were
an unusual group of pickets for we wore caps and gowns and paraded with dignity
on the beautiful campus, but we carried picket signs to show that we were the
intellectual brothers of every worker on strike.

After
some hours the Yale Corporation agreed to see a committee of three chosen from the
delegation. I was one of them. In a gloomy paneled room with high ceilings we
sat in high-backed chairs ~ my feet hardly touched the floor ~ and faced four
members of the Corporation, silent men who would not talk except to say they
were there only to listen. In vain we asked questions. The answer was always
the same: they were there to listen, not to argue.

We
outlined our demands. We made propaganda speeches about the role of American educators
and about the right of a professor to participate in community problems. Then
we reported to the assembled academic picketers that the power of concentrated
wealth which the Yale Corporation represented had heard our remarks and
promised to consider them.

As
a result of our efforts the Corporation agreed to give Professor Davis a year’s
salary but refused to reinstate him. We were satisfied. He had got something
out of our efforts and the Federation had a president who was a college
professor.

The
next convention was held in Madison, Wisconsin, the following year and again I was
delegate. Our Teachers Union had fared well that year in New York, having grown
enormously in numbers, prestige, and victories. I had once again taken a leave
of absence from Hunter in the spring of the year to represent the Union at the
legislature. The trustees of the college had been reluctant to grant this leave
but intercession by Mayor LaGuardia, with whom I was still on friendly terms,
again assuredly leave.

The
CIO organization of mass unions and the rapid rise in union membership
everywhere had brought great prestige and tremendous power to labor. We
teachers rode on labor’s coattails and were grateful to the Party for helping
us to remain close to labor through all the shifts.

By
1937 the sit-down strikes in large plants and in WPA and welfare offices in New
York fired the imagination of young intellectuals in the Teachers Union and we
were eager to throw our lot in with the CIO. Wherever the Party teachers had
influence we joined with strikers and walked in their picket lines. In New York
we joined the newspapermen at the Brooklyn Eagle and at the Newark Ledger;
at the telegraph offices we joined the communications workers. On the water
front we gave time and money and even our homes to striking seamen. We marched
in May Day parades in cap and gown.

That
year we went to the convention hoping to take the Federation into John L.
Lewis’ CIO. We were fascinated by him, by his shaggy head and incredible
eyebrows, by his biblical allusions, and by his Shakespearean acting. We were
an odd group as I see it now, madcap intellectuals escaping from our
classrooms, to teach workers’ classes in Marxism and Leninism in our free
hours. A few of the more astute paid only lip service to this activity, hoping
to capture higher posts in academic circles where better service could be given
to the cause. But most of the professors involved in this merry-go-round became
better politicians than they were educators.

The
convention at Madison had a large contingent of college professors, especially
from teacher-training schools, and they began more and more to dominate the
Federation.

Among
them were John de Boer and Dorothy Douglas and a score of brilliant
left-wingers, including the attractive Hugh de Lacy from the West Coast. Even
then De Lacy was engaged in splitting the Democratic Party by the formation of
the Democratic Federation which resulted in his election to Congress. He was a valuable
addition to the communist cause.

The
Communist Party had told us that it did not want the teachers to go into the
CIO. It felt it had enough power within the CIO whereas in the A.F. of L. the
Party’s forces were diminishing. I was bitterly disappointed for I believed
that with the liberal CIO forces and its funds the Teachers Union movement
could be vastly expanded. The A.F. of L. did not like to spend money in organizing
teachers. The Party took no chances on having its instructions miscarry.

Rose
Wortis and Roy Hudson, from the Central Committee, were at the convention hotel
to steer the comrades aright. Roy was a tall, angular ex-seaman and Browder’s
labor specialist. He pounded the table and laid down the law. I told him
frankly that I thought we ought to go with the CIO and Jerome Davis and the
professors agreed.

But
we were informed that the Party did not wish it, and discipline was firm among
the floor leaders. A vote was taken and we held to the Party line. The
Communists uniting with some of the conservative members of the Federation
defeated the CIO proposal.

In
the city-wide 1937 elections in New York, the Party, which had helped establish
the American Labor Party the year before, captured several important places
within it. In city politics there was a steady elimination of differences
between the major parties, and responsible leadership in the two old parties
was disappearing. This led inevitably to the control of all parties by a small group
around Fiorello LaGuardia, whose political heir was Vito Marcantonio. It was a
personal dictatorship.

Nominations
were traded in the struggle for power, and the Communist Party was not slow in
insinuating itself into this struggle.

Those
who say LaGuardia was a great mayor forget that he did more to break down the major
political parties and party responsibility than any other person in New York
State. The streets were clean, taxes were lower, graft was less obvious, but
under LaGuardia political power was transferred from the people organized into
political parties into the hands of groups exercising personal power.

The
real political power passed to the well-financed, well-organized unions of the
CIO and of the leftwing A.F. of L. and to the organized national minority
groups, Negro, Italian, Jewish, etc. These groups were used as political
machines to get votes and their self-appointed leaders were rewarded with the
spoils of office. This new pattern I saw repeated over and over again and it
drained both Republican and Democratic Parties.

I
saw LaGuardia meet with the Communists. I saw him accept from Si Gerson and
Israel Amter written withdrawal from a position to which they had been
nominated and receive a certificate of substitution at the mayor’s request. A
half-hour later I heard him address the Social Democrat wing of the American
Labor Party at the Hotel Claridge, and the first thing he did was excoriate the
Communists. Communists were in the audience and not one of them seemed even to
notice this humbug. Thus LaGuardia played with both wings of the Labor Party to
his own advantage. Such were the politics to which the idealists were giving
themselves.

The
election campaign for 1937 was important to the left wing for it could begin
now to make deals for power, with the Social Democrats of the American Labor
Party, with the Democrats, with the Republicans, and with men of wealth who
wanted public office and public spoils.

The
American Labor Party that year supported the LaGuardia slate, which included Thomas
Dewey for district attorney. I was surprised when Abe Unger, a Party lawyer
whom I knew well, asked me to help organize a woman’s committee for the
election of Thomas Dewey. How Abe got into that campaign I do not know, but I
do know that he organized for Dewey the labor groups which had earlier opposed
him because of his investigations and prosecution of many unions.

I
remember one especially hilarious Teachers Union meeting that year just before
the election. It was held at the Hotel Diplomat and we were cheering the
candidates of the American Labor Party and its allies when Thomas Dewey,
accompanied by his campaign managers, whizzed into the meeting and whizzed out
again after making a short speech. And I thought, with satirical amusement,
that politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

By
1938 my work for the Union and for the schools was engaging me so deeply that
it interfered with my work as a teacher, so I decided to resign from Hunter and
take a full-time position with the Union.

Many
of my friends were surprised to hear of my decision. They were amazed that I
should be willing to leave the college, my tenure, and my pension, and other
rights for an uncertain union job at a reduced salary, and worst of all for a
job dependent on yearly elections.

President
Colligan was deeply distressed when I told him and he asked me to reconsider. “These
people will take you and use you, Bella,” he warned me, “and then they will throw
you away.”

I
looked at him. I could see that he was sincerely troubled about me and I
appreciated it. But I thought him old-fashioned and fearful of new viewpoints.
Besides, I knew he was a Catholic and opposed to the forces with which I was
associated.

I
shook my head. “No, I have decided,” I told him. “In this country one hundred
and forty million Americans have no tenure and no security. I’ll take my
chances with them.” And I handed him my resignation from Hunter College

CHAPTER
NINE

I
gave up my Hunter College work mainly because I felt I could not serve two
masters. If I remained a teacher, I felt my undivided attention ought to be
given to my students and not shared with outside organizations. I was afraid
also that, if I remained a teacher, as many teacher politicians did, there
would be a conflict between my desire to serve the interests of the college and
my sense of dedication to the interests of the “downtrodden.”

I
made the choice without regard for the future, confident that in the working class
I should find satisfaction and security. As the legislative year again
approached, I became a full-time employee of the Teachers Union at sixty
dollars a week. This is the salary I received during the years I worked for the
Union. I did not then or later ask for an increase. I was sensitive about
workers’ money. I had heard so much about “pie card artists” who were the
opportunists and careerists in the trade-unions movement that I did not want to
tempt myself. I worked for the Union for eight years at that salary.

In
that first year I devoted myself especially to pressuring the New York Board of
Education to fulfill its moral obligation to thousands of substitute teachers
who had been in the schools during the depression as per-diem employees. They taught
a full program on a par with the regularly appointed teachers in all things
except that they did not receive an annual wage, had no vacation pay, and were
docked for every day ill or absent. These teachers hated holidays, for on those
days they went unpaid, and they had no pension rights. They were called
“substitute” teachers, but they were not substituting for anyone.

The
result was an educational jungle in which only the most strident voices could
be heard. In fact the law of the jungle itself was sometimes followed. The WPA
teachers, the substitutes, the instructors’ associations in the colleges, were
goaded by a sense of injustice and a fear of failure. This was the lush soil in
which the communist teachers’ fraction in the Teachers Union flourished.

The
fact that the opportunity for free public education was provided in New York
City from grades through college without expense to parents, with even
textbooks free, created an intellectual proletariat. These men and women needed
jobs commensurate with their education, and teaching at that time was the work
most sought by them. When these would-be teachers began to run into the
political ineptness and the callous do-nothing policy of the educational
authorities there was bound to be conflict.

In
the substitute teachers’ campaign I attracted thousands of nonunion teachers. I
felt I had to find a way to help them. And in a quiet way they began to be
grateful to the Communists.

There
were dark by-products of the struggle. The younger teachers who had been forced
into the WPA and substitute-teacher categories were the children of the most
recent immigrants, the Italians, the Greeks, the Jews from Russia, and the
Slavs. Merging with this group were the children of the expanding Negro
population of the city who were qualified educationally for professional jobs. The
positions of power and of educational supervision, however, were held mostly by
persons of English, Scotch, and Irish origin.

The
Communists, who are unerring in attaching themselves to an explosive situation,
had their answers for these troubled young teachers. Their chief answer was
that we had reached the “breakdown of the capitalist system.”

To
those who were self-conscious on race or religion they said that “religious or
racial discrimination” was the cause. When individual instances of bigotry and
discrimination arose, the Communists were quick to note them and to exaggerate
them.

So
a cleavage was established between the older teachers, who were largely
Protestants, Catholics, and conservative Jews, and the new teachers who were
increasingly freethinkers, atheists, or agnostics, and sometimes called
themselves “humanists.”

The
Teachers Union was in a dilemma on the substitute teacher question. On the one
hand, it wanted to cater to the older and more established teachers who were
saying that the Union was championing only the rag, tag, and bobtail of the
profession. On the other hand, it knew that the substitutes of today would be
the regulars of the future; and besides more Communists could be recruited from
those pinched economically.

The
fraction leaders of the Union were divided on the issue. Some were willing to
drop it because they wanted to hold a position of authority among the regular
teachers, so that they could influence educational policy and curriculum
change. I sometimes came back from Albany to find the old guard with set, grim
faces, and I knew they had been discussing the disavowal of the campaign for
the substitute teachers.

To
me it was a cause, and I appealed to the Party for a decision. I received a
favorable one. I now began consciously to build new Party leadership in the
Union. I surrounded myself with younger Party members who were more alert to
new situations and did not think in rigid Marxist patterns.

We
did not succeed in passing the substitute-teacher legislation for which we
fought at Albany. But we made it the most controversial legislation of the 1938
sessions. Later, when it was passed byte legislature, Governor Lehman vetoed it
reluctantly after the entire Board of Education had used its power against it.
However, in vetoing it he urged New York City to do something about the
situation.

He
added that if the city failed to do so he would act favorably on such
legislation in the future. The Union and the communist group grew immeasurably
in stature and prestige among the new crop of teachers and among other
civil-service employees. Even politicians and public officials respected us for
our relentless campaign.

I
was weary at the end of that session. Yet I stayed in Albany to attend the
State Constitutional Convention, determined to write into the new constitution
guarantees for an expanding public-school system. Charles Poletti, former
lieutenant governor and Supreme Court judge, was secretary of the Convention,
and he, together with Edward Weinfeld, now a federal judge, was helpful in safeguarding
the achievements of the public-school system.

In
the fall of 1938, the American Labor Party nominated me for the Assembly in the
old Tenth Assembly district, the area including Greenwich Village. It was a
famous district represented at various times by Herbert Brownell and MacNeil
Mitchell. On the ticket with me and running for Congress from the same area was
George Backer, at that time married to Dorothy Schiff, owner of the New York
Post. It was the period when the Alex Rose-David Dubinsky wing of the Labor
Party and the communist wing were still in coalition ~ an uneasy alliance born
of expediency. Both were seeking control of New York State politics.

The
Teachers Union organized my campaign committee. We wrote political songs, made recordings,
and did a great deal of street-corner speaking. By this time I had taken part
in so many election campaigns in difficult areas that I developed a facility
for speechmaking.

One
of my favorite charges was that the candidates of the Republican Party and of
the Democratic Party were lawyers connected with the same law partnership, a
firm which represented the public-utility interests. We used to enlarge on this
fact, and concluded with “Tweedledum and Tweedledee ~ you’d better vote the ALP.”

Late
one evening, as I was winding up a street-corner meeting at Seventh Avenue and
Fourteenth Street, I saw David Dubinsky, who lived in the neighborhood, and
George Meany go by.

They
stopped to listen for a few moments, then smiled at each other, and went on.
Suddenly, and for the first time, there came over me a sense of futility over
this endless activity in which the Communists were involving me.

That
year John and I were living in a small and charming house on West Eleventh
Street. My parents occupied one floor, John and I the next, and the duplex
above us we rented to Susan Woodruff and her husband. Susan was a dear old lady
whose husband was a Princeton graduate and a Republican. Susan, on the other
hand, was an avowed Communist and admirer of the Soviet Union; though like her
husband she traced her ancestry to the early settlers of America. Later she
became one of the three old ladies who ostensibly owned the Daily Worker.

I
loved Susan and respected her for the honesty of her open affection for the
Soviet Union. She had gone to Russia in the thirties and had taken pictures of
Soviet scenes. These she had arranged in slides and she offered to show them
free as well as give a lecture to churches and Y’s. She genuinely believed that
the Soviet Union meant an advance for humanity and she was eager to do her part
in strengthening it.

The
Party was always happy to use such voluntary propagandists. Even
anti-communists never attempted to show such people as Susan that Communists
and their fellow travelers were helping to undermine not a selfish capitalist
class, but the very life of her own group.

She
was surrounded by likeminded people, Mary van Kleek of the Russell Sage
Foundation, Josephine Truslow Adams, Annie Pennypacker, and Ferdinanda Reed.
When I saw Susan and others of old American families devoted to the principles
of service to humanity it helped to allay any doubts I had.

At
the end of 1938 we gave up our house in the Village and moved to one in Poughkeepsie
because my parents wanted to be in the country. My father’s health was failing.
My mother welcomed the chance to be in the country again. I kept a room in the
city and went home for weekends. John was often away on business and the rest
of the time he stayed in Poughkeepsie, for he, too, preferred country living.

The
legislative session of 1939 had reflected the now deepening depression which
had been gathering momentum. The public hearings on the state budget which took
place on Lincoln’s Birthday brought demands for a cut in state aid to
education. It was a struggle now between the organized taxpayer group with the
slogan, “Ax the tax,” and the Teachers Union which led an army of teachers and
parents with the counter slogan, “Don’t use the ax on the child.” But a ten per
cent cut in state aid was passed ~ a cut which we felt endangered the education
program and meant a loss of teachers’ jobs.

At
the end of the session the legislature passed a resolution calling for a legislative
investigation into the costs of education and of the administrative procedures
of education. There was a rider at the end calling for an investigation into
the subversive activities of teachers in New York City.

I
called immediate attention to the fact that the study of the costs of education
was tied to one for investigating subversive activities. I concluded that the
legislative leaders wanted to reduce costs, but that in order to do so it would
be necessary to smear the teachers. I charged they were using a Red baiting
technique to undermine education.

Neither
Mayor LaGuardia nor the officials of the American Labor Party would move to ward
off this attack. A legislative committee was appointed, headed by Senator
Frederic Coudert, a Republican from New York City, and Herbert Rapp, a
Republican from upstate. Other teacher organizations discounted this attack on
the educational budget and regarded it merely as an attack on the Teachers
Union, and no doubt were secretly pleased.

In
April 1939 John called me in Albany and urged me to come home immediately. My father
was dying in St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie.

I
was very grateful to John that despite his hostility to Catholicism he had
recognized my father’s wishes and had called a Catholic doctor and then taken
him to a Catholic hospital. Ruth Jenkins, my secretary, drove me at a furious
speed through a night of sleety rain. When I reached the hospital, my father
was alone behind screens with an oxygen tank beside him, unconscious or asleep.

A
nun attending him told me he had received the last rites. I felt thankful
though I had long since ceased believing in such things myself. I did feel that
something was needed to lessen the pain of dying and to give life meaning.

As
I stood by my father’s bedside looking at him, my hand over his, he opened his
eyes, still so blue and bright, and, though he could not speak, he looked at me
steadily, and then a single tear fell from his eye. It cut into me and troubled
me for years afterward, for somehow it seemed to represent his sorrow about me.
I thought, with remorse, how in these cluttered years I had failed him as a
daughter and had left him without my companionship.

He
was buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery at Poughkeepsie. There were not many at the
funeral but the town officials gave him a motor escort to the cemetery, as
evidence of their affection for him as a friend and good citizen. After the
funeral I went back to Albany with a heavy heart to face a mass of work.

The
Communist Party had been quick to realize that to avert the attack on the communist
teachers, a thing which might lead to the heart of the Party; it must help the
campaign against the pending Rapp-Coudert investigation. In a move to spare the
Union the strain of all this and also to bring people other than teachers into
the fight, we organized a committee called “Friends of the Free Public
Schools.” Under its aegis we collected funds, more than $150,000 the first
year. We published attractive booklets which we sent to teacher organizations,
to trade unions, to women’s clubs, to public officials.

I
set up a booth and an exhibit at the New York State Fair in Syracuse and I
covered numerous county fairs, issuing a strident call for aid to the public
schools. We got free time on dozens of radio programs. We put on interesting
programs over a radio station in New York. We organized “Save Our Schools”
community clubs, made up of teachers, parents, trade unionists, students, and
young people.

We
were a well-trained army and by our well-organized action we gave people a
feeling that in the long run we would win.

That
summer saw a new attack on the New York Teachers Union. Friends of Dr. Lefkowitz,
largely from the professorial group in the American Federation of Teachers,
together with a socialist bloc, some old-line A.F. of L. members, and some
anti-communists, were organized.

They
were under leadership of Dr. George Counts and Professor John Childs of
Teachers College, Professor George Axtelle of Chicago, the socialist teachers’
bloc of Detroit, the Teachers Union of Atlanta, Selma Borchard of Washington,
and George Googe who was the A.F. of L. representative at the convention that
year. These, together with New York City minority groups, chief among whom were
Lovestonites led by Ben Davidson (later secretary of the Liberal Party of New
York City) and his wife Eve, formed a mixed group but it united for one
objective.

They
planned to take the leadership in the Federation from the Communists. But the Party
brought in reserve strength from the Northwest, from California, from the
South, in addition to its forces in the East and New England. We had not been
too successful in the Middle West, where the conservative Chicago Teachers
Union and the St. Paul and Minneapolis teachers with their large locals swamped
the small locals of college teachers and private schoolteachers which we had
been able to establish. Loss of control faced the Communists.

To
make matters worse, news of the Soviet-Nazi pact broke during the week of the convention,
with the result that we were now driven into a minority position. Even though
some hidden Communists remained in office, we were powerless to use the
American Federation of Teachers to help the distraught New York locals. We
feared that the newly elected officers would do their own investigating of the
New York situation, and perhaps lift our charters.

The
Soviet-Nazi collaboration came at a time when the civilized world could no
longer remain silent at the Nazi atrocities against Jews and other minorities.
The large Jewish membership of the unions under the leadership of David
Dubinsky and Alex Rose had its own reasons for hating the Communists, reasons
arising out of the old feuds and the struggle to control unions, and because of
the untrustworthiness of the Communists in joint enterprises. Now these people
were genuinely outraged at the picture of Molotov shaking hands with Von
Ribbentrop.

The
Jewish people within the Party were also disturbed and quite a few left it.
Those who remained rationalized the event on the ground that the warmongers of
the West wanted to destroy the Soviet Fatherland, so in self-defense it had
outfoxed the Western “warmongers” by making an alliance with their enemy. I was
too busy with the teachers’ problem to give much attention to this outrage
though it troubled me.

Though
the Communists supported Mayor LaGuardia in the election campaigns I became
impatient with his attitude on teacher problems and finally to exert pressure
we threw a picket line around City Hall. We made a singing picket line;
twenty-four hours of it, an all-day and all-night picketing and, as a publicity
stunt, I announced to the press that there would be prayers at sunrise. I tried
to get a Catholic priest to say the sunrise prayers for us, but even the
priests from the poor parishes around City Hall looked at me oddly and said
they could not do it without permission from the chancery. I offered to pay
them, to make a contribution to their charities, but they only eyed me more
oddly and refused with thanks. Eventually a liberal minister agreed to come and
lead our pickets in prayer.

The
Party did not arrange for that picket line but it was pleased when the news hit
the front-pages of the newspapers and they used pictures of the pickets at Morning
Prayer. Strange as it may seem, I believe we did pray that morning.

This
episode ended my friendship with LaGuardia, for he was furious at the adverse
publicity. It did accomplish something. The Board of Education was ordered to
look into the situation of the substitute teachers.

By
fall of 1939 the Rapp-Coudert Committee had settled down to work with a score of
investigators. On the committee were men I could not dislike, mild, fair men
such as Robert Morris, Philip Haberman of the Anti-Defamation League, and
Charles S. Whitman, son of the former governor of New York.

Assemblyman
Rapp was an up-stater concerned chiefly with educational finance and
administration. So he played a negligible role in the investigation.

That
left one person on whom to turn our combined fury. Senator Coudert was a Republican,
cold and patrician in appearance. Because of his international law firm with an
office in Paris and the fact that it acted for many White Russians, we looked
on him as an agent of imperialism. From the Communist Party and from the men
who represented the Soviet interests in this country we got the go ahead signal
to make him our target. The Party placed its forces at the teachers’ disposal,
since the teachers were now in the vanguard holding the line in defense of the
Party itself.

I
knew that the fight would be bitter, but I was not prepared for its violence.
The first attack was on the membership lists of the Teachers Union. Within the
Union there were still those who belonged to the splinter groups, Lovestonites,
Trotskyites, Socialists, but in the course of the fight in 1940 these splinter
groups left the Union and busied themselves in other organizations. Local Five
was served with a demand, a subpoena duces tecum, by the Rapp-Coudert
Committee to produce all our records, membership lists, and financial reports.

There
was general consultation. The Party established a joint chief-of-staff group
with several from the teachers’ fraction. It included such Party leaders as
Israel Amter, Jack Stackel, Charles Krumbein, all from Party headquarters, and
several of the Party’s lawyers. They were a top command to direct operations.
The strategy decided on was to defend the teachers by defending the Party. The
lesser policy, or tactics, was to be established from day to day.

For
the “Committee to Defend the Public Schools” we hired a battery of lawyers, as
it was impossible for one lawyer to attend to the many demands. We decided to
fight the seizure of our Union membership lists all the way to the Court of
Appeals. This would gain time and enable us to continue organizing the mass
campaigns against the legislative committee. It would also serve to wear out the
investigating committee.

To
protect our membership lists we appealed for trade union support. We sent
speakers to union meetings on the water front, to the hotel and restaurant
workers, to the meat cutters, to the state, county, and municipal workers, both
A.F. of L. and CIO. We trained speakers, prepared speakers’ outlines,
mimeographed form resolutions, and sent hundreds of form telegraph messages to the
governor and to majority and minority leaders.

We
tried even the impossible. I remember one state A.F. of L. meeting in Albany
presided over by Tom Lyons, then its president. I asked for the floor, made an
appeal for support, and reminded the delegates that the struggle for union
organization had been a long and tough one, that at one time union men carried
their cards in the soles of their shoes. I pointed out that though it was our
Union which was under attack, it might be theirs tomorrow. Then I moved for
support.

I
got none whatsoever. The communist delegates in that audience were afraid to
speak up. And then I saw that there was more compassion in the face of Tom
Lyons who was opposed to everything I stood for than in the faces of the
comrades who were preserving their own skins. It had been our decision that
membership lists were not to be turned over to the Committee even if we lost in
the courts.

The
membership files were turned over to me and I was ordered to refuse to turn the
lists in, preferring jail if necessary. I happened to be out of the office when
the Committee came to demand them, and Miss Wallas, in whose custody were the
public schoolteacher lists, gave them to the representatives of the Committee,
presumably at Mr. Hendley’s direction.

I
burned the lists of the college Union teachers which were in my possession. We
were afraid that through them the Committee would be able to trace a pattern of
membership, since our cards showed who sponsored each individual and the date
on which he joined.

Once
the Committee got the cards it began to issue subpoenas. We instructed those teachers
who were not Party members to appear before the Committee and to tell the
truth. But there were hundreds for whom the truth might mean dismissal, and
these we decided to protect.

The
Party now placed at our services its intelligence apparatus, for the Communist
Party has its own intelligence officers, in splinter groups, in the trade
unions, in major divisions of our body politic, in the police departments, and
in intelligence divisions of the Government. I was to see some proof obits
efficiency. For no sooner did the Rapp-Coudert Committee begin to issue
subpoenas than I got a message from Chester, who was in charge of the Party
Intelligence, assuring me he had arranged for a liaison who would meet me
regularly with information on what was going on in the Rapp-Coudert Committee.

I
met my contact daily, in cafeterias, restaurants, and public buildings. She was
an attractive, aristocratic blonde, well-dressed and charming. She gave me
slips of paper which bore the names of those witnesses whom the Committee was
using to get information and a list of those who were to be subpoenaed.

Armed
with this advance information, we would go to the Union members who were to be
called and warn them. If we wanted to gain time, the person was told to send
word he was sick, even enter a hospital if necessary. If it were feasible, he
was to move. If not, we assigned a lawyer or a union representative to go with
the person to the hearing. Most of the teachers were instructed not to answer
questions and to take a possible contempt citation. Some were instructed to
resign from their jobs, because we feared the Committee would publish the facts
about their international connections. If the teachers told the truth, they
might involve other Party contacts.

The
Coudert Committee issued more than six hundred subpoenas. The teachers over
whom the Party had control followed our directions and instructions. Because they
were forewarned by us they were able, with our assistance, to prepare defense
stories to give the Committee. After each person had been down to the Committee
meeting he was instructed by us to write an exact resume of what had transpired
with all the questions and answers, and these were delivered to our Defense
Committee. We studied these resumes for possible evidence of the trend of the
Committee’s inquiry so that we could better arm the next batch of teachers to
be called.

It
was while I was going over these stories that I realized for the first time
just how important a part of the communist movement in America the teachers
were. They touched practically every phase of Party work. They were not used
only as teachers in Party education, where they gave their services free of
charge, but in the summer they traveled and visited Party figures in other
countries.

Most
of them were an idealistic, selfless lot who manned front committees and were
the backbone of the Party’s strength in the Labor Party and later in the
Progressive Party.

Even
in the inner Party apparatus they performed invaluable services. They provided
the Party with thousands of contacts among young people, women’s organizations,
and professional groups. They were generous in helping finance Party activities.
Some supported husbands who were Party organizers or on special assignment for
the Party.

There
is no doubt that the Rapp-Coudert investigation of New York City schools
provided the legislature with a great deal of information on how Communists
work. It also provided a good example of how they fight back, sometimes by a
defensive fight against those conducting the investigation and with every
weapon at the Party’s disposal, including smearing, name-calling, frame-up, careful
combing of each investigator’s history and background. If there is nothing that
can be attacked, then some innuendo is whispered which by repetition snowballs
into a smear and makes the public say, “Where there is smoke there must be
fire.”

Sometimes
the campaign is on the offensive. Some angle is found to explain the evil
motives of those who are conducting the investigation, perhaps to show that the
investigation is itself a blind for some ulterior motive and that the result
will deprive people of certain rights. In the teacher fight we steadfastly kept
before the public the idea that the investigation was intended to rob the
public schools of financial support and to promote religious and racial
bigotry.

Little
by little we won the campaign, at least in the opinion of many people; and we distracted
the attention of the public from the specific work of the Committee. Support
for the teachers, which at first had come only from the Communist Party,
increased and included liberals, left trade unions, national group
organizations, religious organizations, then political parties of the left,
then leftwing Democrats, then so-called Progressive Republicans. All the
support, however, was for tangential issues and not the basic issue. It did not
matter to us so long as they marched at our side. Their reasons were unimportant
to us.

The
United States was in process of being coaxed into an alliance with England and
France at this time. At first the Communist Party was in seeming opposition to
this because of the Soviet-Nazi pact, and United Party members became anti-war.
Party groups began making alliances with the most vicious pro-Hitler groups in
America.

These
communist activities of a low order always suck in those who begin as more or
less sincere but misguided idealists but remain to follow the Party blindly. The
Daily Worker editorials continuously blasted the Rapp-Coudert Committee as
a technique of the warmongers.

The
American Communists came close to pacifism in those days. This phase did not
last, but in the course of it the Teachers Defense Committee published a book
called Winter Soldiers, of which some ten thousand copies were printed.
It was beautifully illustrated. We had cartoons contributed by leading artists
because the proceeds were to go to the Defense Committee. But we were forced to
desist from further distribution when we learned that the International
Communist line had changed once again and the Party was now pro-war, as the
Communist International had always intended that America should be.

The
International had frightened the Western world by its alliance with Hitler; now
the campaign to involve America in the world war was once again in full swing.
This time the Party had some difficulty, because so many new friends of the
Party found it difficult to swing nonchalantly from a support of pacifism to a
support of war. Thousands of students under the impetus of the Communists had
taken the Oxford oath against war.

Many
had read with joy the anti-war poems of Mike Quinn, who had also provided the
CIO with its slogan, “The Yanks are not coming.” Thousands of women had worked
with the Party on its mass committees, such as the League against War and
Fascism ~ a title which was later changed to American Committee for Peace and
Democracy, and then to American Mobilization Committee.

In
1940 I had been selected by the Party to lead a committee called Women’s Trade Union
Committee for Peace. We raised money, hired a young man to do public relations,
and arranged a mass delegation to Washington. There we lobbied with
representatives and senators. We went on the air wither-German speakers. We set
up a continuous picket line in front of the White House.

It
had been at this time that a final break came between my husband and me. For
some time John had been disturbed by my increasing activity with the
Communists. He himself was pro-British.

He
had served in the Canadian Air Service during World War I until America’s
entry. He despised what he called the “phony peace” campaigns. There were other
and personal reasons why our marriage had not been successful, but the breaking
point came at this time. He told me he was leaving for Florida to get a
divorce.

I
stayed on at our apartment in Perry Street. My mother had come to live with us
some months before. I shuttled back and forth between Albany and New York that
spring, devoting all my time to the Union and other Party causes. It was during
these months that I developed my deepest loyalty to the Communist Party. In
great part this was because I was grateful to them for their support of the
teachers.

I
still did not see communism as a conspiracy. I regarded it as a philosophy of
life which glorified the “little people.” I was surrounded by people who called
themselves Communists and who were warmhearted people like me. In the world
outside there was immorality and decadence and injustice; there was no real
standard to live by. But among the Communists I knew there was moral behavior
according to well-defined standards and there was a semblance of order and
certitude.

The
rest of the world had become cold and chaotic to me. I heard talk of
brotherhood, but I saw no evidence of it. In the group of Communists with which
I worked I did find a community of interest.

In
addition to the Teachers Union work I continued as an active leader of the
American Labor Party. I was assigned to work with a committee to free the
leaders of the Furriers Union who had been sent to prison for industrial
sabotage. I organized a committee of women, including the wives of the
imprisoned men, to visit congressmen and the Department of Justice.

We
talked with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt at her apartment on Eleventh Street. She graciously
agreed to do all in her power to get our memoranda into the hands of the
appropriate officials. She was sympathetic with the wives of the imprisoned men
who had come with me.

Only
one note in the interview disturbed me. The matter of the right of Communists
to be leaders of trade unions had come up in the general discussion. Mrs.
Roosevelt said that she believed Communists should be permitted to be members
but not leaders of trade unions.

The
position seemed illogical to me and I said so. Communism cannot be right for
little people, for the workers, and wrong for the leaders. There can be only
one moral code for all. Perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt, like myself and many other well-meaning
people in America, has by this time learned that there is no halfway house in
which you can meet the communist movement. Co-existence is not possible on any
level.

In
the summer of 1940 we attended the American Federation of Teachers convention
in Buffalo, fearful of our welcome. It was almost ironic that once again we
were at a convention at a time when the international communist scene was
stirred by a dramatic event. The previous year we had heard of the signing of
the Soviet-Nazi pact; now came news of the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The
combined Socialists, Trotskyites, and Lovestone group practically held us
responsible for this event.

But
the real result of that 1940 convention was the fact that the George Counts
group took control of the American Federation of Teachers and soon after the
New York, Philadelphia, and other communist-led locals had their charters
lifted. In New York the coveted charter of the American Federation of Teachers
affiliation went to Dr. Lefkowitz and the new organization he had built, the
Teachers Guild.

This
automatically ended our formal relations with the A.F. of L. The New York Teachers
Union was now an independent union not affiliated with either of the great
labor movements. I thought bitterly of that convention in Madison when we would
have been welcomed into the CIO, but the Party forbade it. The loss of the
charter had come about chiefly as a result of the unfavorable publicity given
us during the Rapp-Coudert investigation and by foreign events.

I
returned to New York to learn more bad news. Nearly fifty of our teachers had
been suspended from their jobs. But perhaps the greatest blow was the
indictment of one of our teachers, Morris U. Schappes, on the charge of
perjury. An English teacher at City College, an ardent Communist, himself a
graduate of City College, he was the child of parents who lived close to want
on the lower East Side.

With
his devoted wife, Sonia, he lived as dedicated a life, that is, as dedicated to
communism, as anyone I ever met. He was the flame that fired the City College
boys, and the teachers, too, when their revolutionary devotion ebbed. Under the
name of “Horton” he was the New York Party director of education while he was
still teaching at City College. He had exercised tremendous influence on class
after class in the college, and in the organizing of the college teachers into
the Union he had worked indefatigably.

When
he was subpoenaed by the Committee, it was decided that he should either refuse
to answer certain questions and take a contempt citation with almost certain
loss of his job, or resign from it. When I returned from Albany, I learned that
the top-level committee in my absence had again changed the decision: he was to
admit he was a Communist and say that he and three others published the
Communist shop paper, the Pen and Hammer, which was circulated
anonymously at City College.

The
trouble was that the three Communists he named were either dead or gone from
the college and the Coudert Committee was able to prove that his statement was
a falsehood. Morris Schappes was indicted and brought to trial before judge
Jonah Goldstein, remanded to the old Tombs, with bail set at ten thousand
dollars.

When
the doors of the dirty old rat-infested Tombs closed on him I hated the world I
lived in. It didn’t seem possible that ordinary men could put a man in jail
when his only desire was to improve the condition of the poor, when he gained
nothing personally from his activities. I hated Tom Dewey, the district
attorney, whom I blamed for the catastrophe. I hated the “system” which I
thought was at the bottom of the tragedy. I went to Sonia and did what I could
to help her.

We
organized a committee for Schappes’ defense. We held a mass meeting in front of
the New York Supreme Court in Foley Square and laid a wreath on the steps of
the courthouse “in memory of academic freedom.” For this was the issue we
injected into the Schappes case to gain public support. Meantime, I received
ten thousand dollars in cash from one of the Party’s friends and Morris was out
of jail pending appeals.

About
this case there is still a certain irony. Schappes’ trial attorney, Edmund
Kuntz, was one of the trial lawyers in the Rosenberg atom spy case. It is
equally ironical that Morris Schappes was one of the teachers who inspired Julius
Rosenberg at City College while he was a student there.

At
the end of the trial Morris Schappes was convicted and sentenced to two to four
years in state Prison.

A
new period was at hand, a period of extremes, when the united front of
Communists and the forces of national unity in the United States were to work
together to win the war. Morris Schappes was forgotten except by his wife and a
few loyal friends. The communist Party was now in coalition with the forces
which had prosecuted Morris.

Late
1940 and early 1941 had been spent in endless preparation of the defenses of individuals
who were brought up before the school boards for dismissals based on the
Rapp-Coudert Committee findings. When the smoke cleared, we found there had
been a loss of from forty to fifty positions in the city colleges and in the
public schools. The Teachers Union had, by and large, withstood the attack.

Some
loss of membership took place but we still had close to one thousand Party
members in a union of about four thousand.

In
February of 1941 my dearly loved mother was taken ill. The diagnosis was
pneumonia. I was in Albany when word came. I hurried back to find to my
distress that agents of the Rapp-Coudert Committee and overzealous newspaper
reporters had broken into my apartment in search of teachers’ lists.

My
mother, in her broken English, had informed them that I was away and would be
glad to see them when I returned. She refused to let them look at any of my
papers but they had pushed her aside and tried to take over. I was furious when
I learned of this illegal invasion of my home. But everyone disclaimed
responsibility and my chief concern at the moment was my mother.

She
was seventy-six years old. She had always been strong in body and she had
continued to have the lively mind of her earlier days. I had never seen her
bored. Her one worry was that I worked too hard, and she often pleaded with me
to relax, but I was driven by inner furies. I took no rest. I did not take
vacations. I liked to say there was no vacation from the class struggle.

For
a long time my activities had no meaning to my mother. All she knew was that I
worked too hard. But she must have known something in her later days, for once
she shook her head and looked at me sadly and said, “America does strange
things to children.”

She
died in my arms one night several weeks later. In the repose of death her face
was lovely, and as I stood by her body I suddenly saw my mother in her big
white sweater with loaves of bread in her hands, striding across the fields at
Pilgrim’s Rest. All around her were the wild birds who knew she had come to
feed them. She helped birds and animals and children and grownups. I would miss
her greatly.

Services
for her were held at the Church of Our Lady of Pompeii on Bleecker Street.
There were not many people in the church with me, but Beatrice came and some of
the Party teachers were there, people alien to this house of God. They came to
comfort my loss. I was deeply touched.

My
mother was buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Poughkeepsie beside my father and
I came back to New York. Now I was entirely alone. My personal life seemed
completely at an end and I belonged only to the cause I served.

I
moved out of the apartment because I could not bear its loneliness. I found a
tiny, inexpensive one on Horatio Street on the top floor of an old house near
the Hudson River.

There
was a window beside my bed and from it I could see the morning sky when I woke up.
Sometimes I thought, as I lay there, how long a way I had come to loneliness.
How far behind me was the room in the embrace of the horse chestnut tree in the
house with my mother and my father and the children of our family, and where I
had planned my future.

I
still had a room and I still had a family. The room was far different from the
one at Pilgrim’s Rest and my family was a great, impersonal family. In its
midst I could find forgetfulness when my body was completely spent and my brain
was weary.

CHAPTER TEN

It
was the summer of 1941. The Teachers Union hoped that the American Federation of
Teachers at its convention would grant readmission to our local. We therefore
elected a full delegation and sent it to Detroit, the convention city. But
those who now controlled the American Federation of Teachers were hardly aware
of any change in the situation. Having expelled the Communists the previous
year, they were not ready to sit down to a peaceful convention with them this
year. They refused to seat the delegates of the expelled locals.

We
held a rival convention across the street. We made speeches, and many delegates
from the regular convention came to listen to us. But we returned to New York
without having realized our objective.

On
the way back to New York, a number of delegates, including Dale Zysman and
myself, were in the same train with Dr. Counts and Professor Childs, top men of
the American Federation of Teachers. Dale, always an excellent mixer, went over
to sit down with them and talked of possible future readmission. Both
professors thought it proper that the United States should become an ally of
the USSR but they felt that the American Communist Party should be disbanded.
This was a political philosophy I did not understand at the time. Later that
year the same two men published a book entitled America, Russia and the
Communist Party in the Post-War World, a fulsome eulogy of the Soviet Union
with an appeal for co-operation in war and in peace between the United States
and the USSR.

But
they called for disbanding of the Communist Party.

That
fall I was still trying to find jobs for teachers who had lost their positions
in the Rapp-Coudert fight. A number of those suspended were still awaiting
departmental trials.

The
Party was no longer interested in them. Its new line was a united front with
all the “democratic forces” ~ meaning all the pro-war forces.

Before
June 1941 it had been an “imperialist war” for the re-division of markets, a
war which could have only reactionary results. But when the Soviet Union was
attacked, the war was transformed into a “people’s war,” a “war of liberation.”

The
American Communist Party dropped all its campaigns of opposition. Its pacifist friends
were again “Fascist reactionaries” and all its energy was employed in praise of
France and England as great democracies. The fight against the Board of Higher
Education had to be brought to an end because the Party regarded Mayor
LaGuardia as a force in the pro-democratic war camp.

Through
an intermediary we offered to make a wholesale deal on the balance of cases remaining
untried before the Board of Higher Education. We were unsuccessful and had to
deal with the cases one by one.

In
the legislative program of the Teachers Union for 1941 I included a proposal to
establish public nursery schools. The WPA nursery-school program which had been
under the State Department of Education was coming to an end. The bill I
introduced for the Union was mild. It was conceived mainly as a program of jobs
for teachers and partly as a social program to aid working women with small
children. The storm of opposition from conservative groups startled me.
Evidently I had stumbled on a controversial issue, one which struck at the role
of the mother in education.

I,
myself, had given educational policy scant attention. Little that was
controversial had been included in my education courses at Hunter College, and
in my graduate work I had steered clear of such courses, feeling that my main
emphasis must be on subject matter. I held to an old-fashioned theory that if a
teacher knew her subject, and had a few courses in psychology and liked young people,
she should be able to teach. I had been horrified to see teachers, who were
going to teach mathematics or history or English, spend all the time of their
graduate work in courses on methods of teaching.

On
December 7, 1941, I called together a few outstanding citizens to discuss the
program of school expansion and to solicit support for nursery schools and
better adult education. The meeting was held at the home of Mrs. Elinor Gimbel,
a public-spirited woman, interested in many causes. With us was Stanley Isaacs,
liberal Republican from Manhattan’s silk-stocking district, which was headed by
Senator Coudert. Also present was judge Anna Kross, Commissioner of Correction in
New York City; Kenneth Leslie, former editor of the magazine The Protestant;
and Elizabeth Hawes, fashionable dressmaker and author of Fashion Is
Spinach.

We
had enjoyed Mrs. Gimbel’s hospitality and talked about discrimination, about
the new waves of population in New York, about the conflict with Catholics on
federal aid, about budgets, school buildings, and teachers’ salaries. As I look
back over the conferences I attended on educational policies and methods and progress,
I realize that we never discussed or thought about what kind of man or woman we
expected to develop by our educational system.

What
were the goals of education? How were we to achieve them? These questions few
asked. Are we asking them today in the higher echelons of the public schools,
and what are our conclusions?

Only
recently I heard the chief of the New York public schools speak on television
on juvenile delinquency. It was soon after the wrecking of a school by young
vandals. He said that what was needed was more buildings, more teachers, better
playgrounds. Those devoted to progressive education and to preparing youth to
live in the “new socialist world” are abstractly sure of what they want, but
they seem not to know that they work with human beings. Aside from teaching
that children must learn to get along with other children, no moral or natural
law standards are set. There is no word about how our children are to find the
right order of harmonious living. I, too, had to learn by hard experience that
you cannot cure a sick soul with more buildings or more playgrounds. These are
important, but they are not enough. Abraham Lincoln, schooled in a one room log
cabin, received from education what all the athletic fields and laboratories
cannot give. All his speeches reflected his love for his Creator. He knew that
God is the cure for godlessness.

On
this Sunday afternoon of December 7, 1941, we talked long and ardently on
education. We talked, too, of the splendid work done by the women of England
for the safety of their children in preparation for bombing attacks. Mrs.
Gimbel finally turned on the radio to give us the news. And as the first sounds
carne we heard an excited voice announcing that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by
Japanese planes. The distant calamity in Europe which we had been discussing in
this pleasant room was now ours. We listened appalled as the voice told us the
full horror of what had happened.

When
the news announcement was over, we looked at each other in silence for a few
minutes.

We
were people of many races and religions and parties, but we were of one mind on
America. So it was only natural that we immediately set to work to make plans,
and that these plans dealt with children. Then and there we formed ourselves
into an emergency Child Care Committee with Mrs. Gimbel as chairman, and to
this committee I promised to turn over my files on nursery schools and to give
all my assistance.

In
the Party we had long expected that the war would involve the United States. In
fact, earlier in the summer the Party had ominously turned its Committee on
Peace into the American Mobilization Committee (for war), and in September we
had held a huge outdoor meeting at the Brooklyn Velodrome. I was one of the
speakers. The keynote of the meeting was the coming war and how to meet it.

The
energies of the Party were now turned to establishing win-the-war committees.
The old feuds of the Teachers Union and the CIO and the A.F. of L. were put
into moth balls and the little arguments and the big ones were forgotten. Now
the Communists became peacemakers between discordant factions everywhere. With
joy and relief I watched the Party serve as an agency for drawing the forces of
the community together to win the war.

Of
course the Communist Party was overjoyed at what was happening. It moved
briskly to place the colossal strength of America at the disposal of the Soviet
Union. Moreover, the rank-and-file Communists were once again tasting the joy
of being accepted by all groups. The Party line made it possible during this
period for ordinary Party members to be merely human beings and to act naturally,
for their neighbors were now less frightened, and even listened to Communists
explain that they were on the side of the American people. All American groups
worked together now on Red Cross committees, on bond rallies, on blood-bank
drives. We were one people united in a common cause.

It
is bitter for me to realize that Communist Party leaders looked upon this
united front as only ataxic to disrupt this country, and that they were using
the good instincts of their own members for their ultimate destruction. Under
the deceptive cloak of unity they moved like thieves in the night, stealing
materials and secrets. Each Communist Party member was used as a part of the
conspiracy, but the majority of them were unaware of it. Only those who knew
the pattern knew how each fitted in the picture.

I
had stayed close to the Party during the worst days of 1939 to 1941, the days
of the Soviet-Nazi pact, primarily because I deeply loved the Teachers Union
which I represented. My love for it was no abstract emotion. I felt affection
for all its members, the strong and the weak, the arrogant and the humble. I
identified myself with them. The kind of sensitivity some people have for their
church or their nation I had for the Union. I grew closer to the Party because
it was endlessly solicitous of the teachers’ problems and gave us favorable
publicity and supported our campaigns.

The
second reason was because of the Party’s campaign against war. I now know that
this antiwar policy was merely a tactic to meet changing conditions. At that
time I could not believe that the communist line was a scheme advancing
Communists one more step closer to total war for total control of the world. I
had slowly come to believe in the infallibility of “scientific socialism” and
in the inevitability of the socialist millennium. I was by no means oblivious
to many signs of crudeness, corruption, and selfishness within the Party but I
thought the movement was a bigger thing.

I,
and hundreds like me, believed in Stachel and Foster, Browder and Stalin, and
the Politburo, and the great Party of the Soviet Union. We felt they were
incorruptible. Blind faith in the Soviet Union, the land of true socialism, was
the last spell that was broken for me. This had been a spell woven of words
cleverly strung together by Party intellectuals who lied, and it was made
plausible by my desire to see man-made perfection in this imperfect world.

During
this period Rose Wortis, a woman of the ascetic type, much like Harriet
Silverman, self-effacing, devoted, tireless in her work, a willing cog in the
machine of professional revolutionaries, was supervising me while I prepared a
leaflet for the Women’s Trade Union Committee for Peace. I had included a
statement against the Nazis, which Rose crossed out as she corrected it, and
she said: “Why do you say that? We do not emphasize that during this period.”

I
was shocked at this, but, unwilling to believe its implications; I excused it
on the ground that she was merely a petty functionary. On a higher level, I was
sure, no one would make so gross an error. Later on I had a chance to see the
higher level.

I
was so completely involved with the Party now that it absorbed all my spare
time. Its members were my associates and friends. I had no others.

To
this was added one other factor, one not to be minimized: I was rising in
importance in this strange world. I had joined as an idealist. Now I was
beginning to stay because of the sense of power it gave me, and the chance of
participation in significant events.

Like
others I had known I was now wearing myself out with devotion and work. I became
sharp and critical of those who did not pour themselves as completely into the
Party. I still based activity only own standards of goodness, of honesty, and
of loyalty. I failed to understand that the Party in making alliances had
nothing whatever to do with these qualities, that it was not out to reform the
world, but was bent on making a revolution to control the world.

I
did not know then that to do so it was ready to use cutthroats, liars, and
thieves as well as saints and ascetics. I should have known, however, had I
reflected on the implications of Lenin’s speech delivered at the Third All-Russian
Congress of the Russian Young Communist League on October 2, 1920: “. . . all
our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of
the proletariat.”

If,
occasionally, I saw things that made me uneasy, I rationalized that the times
demanded such actions. Once I was startled from this calm assumption. A group
of Party and trade-union leaders met in a private home in Greenwich Village to
talk with Earl Browder, then leader of the Communist Party, concerning Vito
Marcantonio and his work with the Party, and especially in regard to coming
elections. Present were several members of the Politburo and a score of
communist union leaders of the A.F. of L. and the CIO.

Marcantonio
was in a very special relation to the Communist Party. As a voice in Congress
he was indispensable. Because he was a close friend of Mayor LaGuardia he
helped give the Party strength. At the same time he provided support for the
mayor because he was the latter’s personal representative in East Harlem. Through
him the mayor retained connections with a section of city politics which no
mayor dares overlook. But Marcantonio did not maintain his hold on his
congressional district without the Communist Party.

At
the meeting we discussed nominations for representative-at-large for New York.
Some of us had recommended endorsement of a Republican who had served in the
State Senate on the Republican and Labor tickets, a man who had ably
represented the East Harlem area. Marcantonio at that time was in alliance with
Tammany Hall, and he insisted on the endorsement of a candidate who had a bad
voting record and was more often absent from his desk in Congress than present.

In
my naiveté I thought that all we had to do was to show the Party leadership his
voting record and the Party would support the better-qualified candidate. But
the answer to our request was a flat “no” from Browder. We were ordered not to
interfere with the decisions of Marcantonio. I sat in utter surprise at this
command, for I had believed firmly that Party decisions were arrived at
democratically.

Even
worse was the next thing to occur. Important trade-union leaders began to
complain about what they termed unreasonable demands made on their unions by
Marcantonio. When they had finished, Browder told them bluntly that anyone who
opposed Marcantonio was expendable. I watched the union leaders listen as the
Party leader delivered his edict. They looked like whipped curs. There was a
short silence after Browder finished, and I saw these men of importance in
their unions begin to explain away their opposition, to laugh nervously about
nothing, to accept a decision they had previously sworn they would never
accept.

With
a sinking heart I accepted it, too, and promptly began to rationalize: it was
no doubt all due to some exigency of practical politics about which I knew
nothing. The incident, however, left me with a lasting residue of resentment.

In
1942, I myself was thrown into the heart of violent left-wing politics. During
the days of the Soviet-Nazi pact the bitterest fight of all was the one between
the Social Democrats and the Communists for control of the American Labor
Party, which had become the balance of power in New York State.

The
Democratic Party could not carry the state without the support of the Labor
Party.

The
Republicans could not carry the state without splitting this new political
force. Those trained in the left-wing school of politics were showing an
aptitude for practical politics which put the old machine politicians out of
the running.

The
Social Democrats under the leadership of Alex Rose of the Millinery Union and
of David Dubinsky of the Ladies Garment Workers Union had originally
collaborated in the building of the American Labor Party. By vying with each
other in making alliances with the Democrats and the Republicans for successive
elections, each group obtained for its followers certain places on the ballot
which would insure election if the joint slate was victorious.

In
1937 and 1939 the combined American Labor Party forces had been successful in getting
posts in city and state elections. With the coming of the Soviet-Nazi pact the
Social Democrats began campaign against the Communists both in the unions and
in the American Labor Party. Because the Communists had wooed the intellectuals
and liberals who were in the Labor Party; because of the Party’s alliance with
Marcantonio’s East Harlem machine (a personal machine); because of Party
strength in the new CIO unions, the Party-supported candidates were victorious
in several primary fights. Thus they had by 1942 dislodged the Social Democrats
from control of the Labor Party in every borough except Brooklyn.

The
spring primaries of that year saw a bitter fight between these two factions for
the control of Brooklyn. I was established by the Party in headquarters at the
Piccadilly Hotel as secretary of committee, ubiquitously called the Trade Union
Committee to Elect Win-the-War candidates. I had the job assigned me of
applying the Party whip to various left-wing unions for money, and forces, for the
elections.

The
committee devoted its energy to two campaigns: to defeat the Dubinsky forces in
Brooklyn, and to win the nomination for Marcantonio in all three political
parties in his congressional district. Hews running in the Republican,
Democrat, and Labor party primaries.

The
communist wing of the American Labor Party won the primary elections in
Brooklyn after a bitter fight which included an appeal to the courts.
Marcantonio won the primary in all three parties after the expenditure of
incredible sums of money and the utilization of an unbelievable number of union
members mobilized by the Party as canvassers in his district.

Every
night thousands of men and women combed the East Harlem district house by
house. The voters were visited many times. On the first visit they were asked
to sign pledges to vote for Marcantonio on a specific party ticket. Next they
were reminded by a caller of the date of the primary.

And
on the day itself they were visited every hour until they went to the polls.
Squads of automobiles waited to take them. Teachers acted as baby sitters.
People who would have scorned working for a Republican or Democratic leader,
willingly and without recompense, did the most menial tasks because the Party
had told them that this was the way to defeat the “fascists.”

Call
it mass hypnosis if you like, but the important thing is to recognize this
appeal to the good in human beings and to realize how it can be used.

Hundreds
of members of the Teachers Union were assigned to Puerto Rican and Negro districts
where they helped people take literacy tests. They manned the polls. They spoke
on street corners during the campaign and listened in ecstasy to Marcantonio,
who ended all his speeches with “Long live a free Puerto Rico,” a rallying cry
which had absolutely nothing to do with the primary elections.

By
the end of the primary campaign I was exhausted. Yet I went back to the
Teachers Union office and worked during the hot summer days to help the
skeleton force working there. I think we were the only teacher organization
which made a practice of keeping some activity going all summer.

We
gave social affairs for out-of-town teachers at Columbia and New York
University. We serviced the summer schoolteachers and substitutes and we
prepared for the coming school term.

In
that year the American Labor Party decided to support the Democratic candidate,
Jerry Finkelstein, against Frederic Coudert for the State Senate. The Teachers
Union responded to the appeal for help. The senatorial district was a peculiar
one, consisting of three assembly districts, the famous Greenwich Village
Tenth, the silk-stocking Fifteenth, and the Puerto Rican East Harlem
Seventeenth.

Extremes
of wealth and poverty were encompassed in these districts, from fabulous Park
Avenue homes to rat and vermin-infested tenements. The Communist Party released
all teacher comrades from other assignments to let them work on this campaign.

I
was moved into a suite of offices at the Murray Hill Hotel on Park Avenue and
we established a front committee there made up of outstanding citizens. “The
Allied Voters Against Coudert” was officially under the chairmanship of a fine
and intelligent woman, Mrs. Arthur Garfield Hayes. It included people such as
Louis Bromfield, Samuel Barlow, and scores of other respectable people.

One
of the attorneys for Amtorg, the Soviet business organization, contributed
money and also information helpful to the campaign against Coudert. There was
hardly any Democratic organization in the silk-stocking district, and the one
in the Village was reputedly tied so closely with the Republicans that we
established our own. This left the Democratic organization in East Harlem,
which was increasingly under Marcantonio’s control, as the key to the election.
The contest would be won or lost in that district.

I
soon realized that Marcantonio, who had won the primary in all three parties,
was not fighting too hard to carry the district for the American Labor Party
against Coudert. He did not care which party won; he was the candidate in all
three. Besides, Mayor LaGuardia was pledged to do all he could for Senator
Coudert and Marcantonio was responsive to the mayor’s requests. But Marcantonio
promised help, and we made some money available for the leaders of his machine.

My
worst fears were confirmed when I listened to the election returns and knew we
had lost. I did not mind the loss of the silk-stocking district. But to lose
Marcantonio’s district was a blow to my faith in individual people in this
strange left-wing world.

That
night Harry, one of Marc’s old captains, drove me home. I was depressed, not
only because of the loss of the election, but because of the lesson I had
learned. We stopped at the Village Vanguard and there met Tom O’Connor, labor
editor of P.M., a good friend of mine, and one of the human people in the
Party. He looked at me, but I said nothing. He knew what had happened.

When
the Vanguard closed, Tom and I walked downtown to City Hall through the empty
streets. We talked of the “movement” and of the strange dead ends it often led
to.

We
talked of the opportunists who cluttered the road to that Mecca of perfection
on which we still fixed our eyes. We walked across Brooklyn Bridge just as dawn
was breaking. Tom put me in a taxi. When I reached home, I went to bed and
slept twice around the clock

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The war years made everything seem unreal, even the Party. There was, however, no lack
of activity and sometimes the Party had an important part in it.

The
leaders of our Teachers Union were unhappy because they were without labor affiliations;
therefore I negotiated for affiliation with another communist-led union, the
State County and Municipal Workers. We had been Local 5 of the A.F. of L.; now
we became Local 555 of the CIO.

The
Union set up new headquarters at 13 Astor Place in a building once owned by the
Alexander Hamilton Institute and later owned by a corporation controlled by one
of the wealthiest communist-led unions, Local 65 of the Warehousemen’s Union. It
had renamed the building Tom Mooney Hall. Local 65 was renting floors to unions
and left-wing organizations. The State County and Municipal Workers were on the
seventh floor. The Teachers Union took over the fifth floor. It gave us plenty
of space for professional and social activities.

The
Union had assumed the obligation of helping the teachers and professors
displaced by theRapp-Coudert Committee, which was proving difficult to do.
Finally, after brooding over this problem, we decided to establish a liberal
school for adults, thus making employment and spreading education at the same
time.

The
School for Democracy was established with Dr. Howard Selsam, formerly of the
Philosophy Department of Brooklyn College, as director, and with David Goldway,
formerly of Townsend Harris High School and also formerly state director of
education for the Communist Party in New York, as secretary. It was to be
housed also at 13 Astor Place and to use certain facilities jointly with the
Teachers Union. I worked hard to get it organized.

The
school was a success. Almost immediately our science teachers received
well-paying jobs in experimental laboratories. But the Party observed our
venture into education and made ready to bend it to its purposes.

Attached
to the Party for some time had been a school called the Workers School, located
at Party headquarters. This school was conducted by the Party for members and
sympathizers. Its curriculum consisted largely of courses in Marxism-Leninism,
courses in trade-union history, and courses in popularizing the current line of
the Party. The school was frankly one for communist indoctrination and no
compromise was made with bourgeois educational concepts. The school had foreign
atmosphere about it. It was run by old-time Communists, half-affectionately and
half contemptuously referred to as the “Nineteen Fivers.”

Earl
Browder and the national leadership were busy striving to give the Communist
Party the appearance of a native American party to prepare it for its new role
in the war and in the postwar period when it was expected to play an even
greater role. He was enthusiastic about the School for Democracy.

Often
I had the feeling he was impatient with the overwhelming foreignness of the
Party.

Perhaps
his days as child and young man in Kansas had had something to do with it. His slogan,
“Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism,” had irked both the foreign-minded
Communists and the native Americans who had felt it was an attempt to sell a
bogus article. But with the war Browder could work with impunity to convert the
Party into an acceptable American social and political organization.

In
line with this it was decided to take over the School for Democracy with its
core of professors, graduates of the most distinguished bourgeois colleges, and
to join it to the hard core of communist teachers from the Workers School.
Alexander Trachtenberg was put in charge of committee to merge the Workers
School and the School for Democracy. An astute Communist, charter member of the
Party and before that a revolutionary socialist, Trachtenberg was and is now one
of the financial big wheels of the movement. He was also chief of the firm of
International Publishers, which had a monopoly on the publication of communist
books and pamphlets and on the distribution of Soviet books and pamphlets. This
is a highly profitable undertaking.

He
bought a beautiful building on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue,
a stone’s throw from St. Francis Xavier School, to house the new Marxist
School. Plans were already on foot for a string of Marxist Adult Education
schools which would have a patriotic look. The patriots of the American
Revolution and of the Civil War were to be given a new sort of honor ~ a
Marxist status.

The
new school in New York was named the Jefferson School of Social Research. In
Chicago the school was named the Abraham Lincoln School, in Boston the John
Adams School, and in New Rochelle, the Thomas Paine School. These schools were
to play a part in the “third revolution” that was to destroy the nation.

Trachtenberg
once said to me that when communism came to America it would come under the
label of “progressive democracy.” “It will come,” he added, “in labels
acceptable to the American people.”

The
initial funds for the setting up of the Marxist schools were, ironically
enough, contributed by wealthy business people who were personally invited to
attend dinners at the homes of other men of wealth. They came to hear Earl
Browder analyze current events and predict the future with emphasis on the role
the Party would play.

There
is no doubt that Earl Browder, as chief of the Communist Party, was close to
the seats of world power in those days, and that he knew better than most
Americans what was going on, except insofar as events were warped and refracted
by his Marxist ideology. The men who paid their hundred dollar admissions and
contributed thus to the school funds became part of the group which Earl
Browder was to call the “progressive businessmen,” meaning those who were
willing to go along on an international program of communism.

The
lure was attractive: expanded profits from trade with the Soviets. The price to
be paid was unimportant to these well-fed, well-heeled men, who felt the world
was their oyster. The price was respectability for communism at home and
leadership of the Soviets abroad.

I
had no part in the group which planned this new Marxist educational empire,
though I had been the moving spirit in establishing the School for Democracy.
The trustees of the Jefferson School were not educators; they were key
communist figures in the growing hierarchy of a native American leadership for
the Communist Party. There were among them people with unbelievable backgrounds,
some of them Moscow-trained, but they all had a surface of respectability, even
though sometimes a blurred surface.

As
I look back I see that I never ceased keeping for myself a small area of
freedom into which my mind could escape. Some phases of my life I was perfectly
willing to have controlled and even enslaved. I was conditioned to accept the
view that the capitalist system was inefficient, greedy, immoral, and decadent.
My schools and my reading and the depression had put me in agreement with
President Roosevelt in wanting to drive the moneychangers from the Temple.

I
was also willing to follow the Party in its program of practical politics, for
here, too, the attack was upon the grossness and stupidity of those in
government who sat in the seats of power with no plan for the future. Willingly,
too, I helped the Party gain in power in the field of American education
through my work with the Teachers Union. I was always ready to help in the
struggle for admission to the academic world of the intellectuals among our
immigrant population who felt they faced discrimination.

But
I was wary of the Party’s inner educational apparatus. I was not drawn to the dogmatic
pedants of the Party’s schools. No doubt, subconsciously, I realized that all
this was not education but propaganda, and at heart I was really still a
student and a teacher. I wanted to read Marx and Engels and Lenin, but not
under the tutelage of those drab, self-effacing figures who peopled the Party’s
educational quarters.

The
Party leaders made frequent attempts to get me to attend state and national
training schools.

I
was approached repeatedly about the possibility of going to school in Moscow,
but I always pleaded that the immediate emergencies of my work in the Union
made it impossible for me to give time to such a duty. “Perhaps someday,” I
told them.

I
had seen teachers, sailors, furriers, subway conductors, housewives, some with
third-grade education and some with college degrees, lumped together as
students in these state and national training schools and I had seen them come
out with the same stamp of dedicated uniformity. It was a leveling process that
still gave them an odd sense of superiority, as if they were now priests of a new
cult.

With
the development of the new Marxist schools I tended to withdraw further from
this phase of the work. I taught one class at the Jefferson School, but I found
no joy in it.

When
I was offered the directorship of the California Labor School I refused it
without hesitation. I had the vague fear that if I allowed myself to be drawn
into this type of indoctrination the last small refuge where my mind found
freedom would be gone.

The
war years had produced interesting phenomena in communist-led left-wing
circles, not the least of which was public renunciation of the class struggle.
The Party announced that whole sections of the capitalist class had joined the
“democratic front,” the so-called “Roosevelt camp of progress.”

The
Daily Worker never wearied of enumerating those who were clasping hands
in a common purpose, Communists, trade unions, sections of the Democratic
Party, and progressive capitalists.

These
made a coalition, the Party stated, that would win the war and later the peace.

The
Communist Party now assumed the responsibility for establishing a rigid
discipline over the working class. No employer was more effective or more
relentless in checking strikes among the workers, or in minimizing complaints
of workers against inequities of wages and working conditions.

Some
employers were delighted with this assistance. It is startling to note that,
while wages rose a little during those years, they did not compare with the
rise in profits and in monopoly control of basic necessities.

In
other circumstances, Communists would have blasted the fact that war production
was chiefly in the hands of ten large corporations and that 80 per cent of the
war production was in the hands of a hundred firms. Now the Communists
carefully muted such information. Instead, they played on the workers’ feelings
of patriotism.

It
was sad to observe that in the interest of its objectives the Party even barred
the protests of the Negro workers who felt that, now that they were needed in
the war factories, they might win some rights. The Communists opposed the Negro
demands violently. In fact, a campaign of vilification was begun. It was
charged that the leaders of this Negro movement were Japanese agents.

The
Party did all it could to induce women to go into industry. Its fashion
designers created special styles for them and its song writers wrote special
songs to spur them. Use of womanpower in the war industries was, of course,
inevitable, but it also fitted into the communist long-range program. War-period
conditions, they planned, were to become a permanent part of the future educational
program. The bourgeois family as a social unit was to be made obsolete.

After
the Teheran conference, the Party program for shelving strikes was projected
into a permanent no-strike policy. Each time American political leaders emerged
from an international conference, Crimea, Teheran, and Yalta, the Communist
Party announced again its dedication to the win-the ~ war plan. Its leaders
were driving for a strong war and peace unity between the United States and the
Soviet Union. Everywhere the Party leadership was being placed in positions of
importance so that they might direct the home-front segments of the coalition.
Communist leadership was being consulted and utilized by those in power in
government.

The
drive for the second front brought Earl Browder into national prominence, and
we realized that he was being consulted by such national leaders as Sumner
Welles. Government officials we reutilizing Communists to pull together
divergent groups.

When
the Russian War Relief was begun, a glittering array of names of outstanding citizens
adorned its elegant stationery. Sumptuous affairs launched Russian relief in
America. These were attended by people prominent in society and government.

The
Communist Party made the most of this. Now there emerged the Russian Institute
with its imposing headquarters on Park Avenue. This was a sophisticated
propaganda agency; it brought American educators, public officials, artists, and
young people of families of wealth into this left-wing world. Famous names,
Vanderbilt, Lamont, Whitney, Morgan, mingled with those of communist leaders.
The Russian Institute was so respectable that it was allowed to give in-service
courses to New York City schoolteachers for credit.

In
Albany and in Washington a new crop of young, native American Communists
swarmed into the legislative halls as legislative representatives and
public-relation and research aides to legislators.

With
inside information on what was happening, they were able to guide legislators
in the direction of Soviet-American unity. They helped to produce dozens of
important public figures at Madison Square Garden rallies, organized under
various labels but filled by the rank and file of devoted Party members. It was
a glittering society that was emerging, made up of Russian diplomats and
Russian business agents, of Americans in evening clothes, and artistic
Bohemians in careless dungarees, all of them cheering the repeated avowals of
friendship with the Soviet Motherland.

When
in 1943 Stalin announced the dissolution of the Communist International, a
great impetus was given to the drive to build the Communist Party into a native
American party. This dissolution was a tactic meant to lessen fear in those
Americans who did not believe that Soviet-American unity could be achieved
without danger to American sovereignty.

When
I arrived in Albany for the legislative session of 1943 I was besieged with
questions.

Everywhere
I explained the new policy of peace, the new era that was coming to the world
because of this communist policy of amity. When some days later I spoke at a
budget hearing to a packed hall, ostensibly for my Union, I was in reality
putting across the Party’s unity line in terms of the taxation problem.

I
received congratulations from Republicans, Democrats, and representatives of the
taxpayers’ organization. Afterward Gil Green, New York State chairman of the
Communist Party, and Si Gerson, its legislative representative, congratulated
me on my speech. Then Gil said decidedly: “The time has come, Bella, when you
ought to come forward openly as a leader of the Party.” Si Gerson, he added,
was going into the Army soon and there would be need of a new legislative
representative of the Party.“And we want you.”

We
had supper in the grill at the De Witt Clinton Hotel and there we were joined
by CIO men, by local labor lawyers, and a representative of the Farmers Union.
My favorite waiter, a Party member, took our order. I was only half-listening
to the talk of the people milling around our table, for Gil Green had startled
me by his abrupt suggestion, which I knew was almost a command. I liked Gil. He
wore shabby, worn suits and he reminded me of Harriet Silverman and Rose Wortis
and the other self-sacrificing, dedicated people.

In
the Party I was beginning to see many people of a different stripe. During the
war period I saw how opportunism and selfishness engulfed many comrades. They
wore expensive clothes, lived in fine apartments, and took long vacations at
places provided by men of wealth.

There
was, for one, William Wiener, former treasurer of the Party, manipulator for a
score of business enterprises, who wore Brooks Brothers suits, smoked expensive
cigars, and lunched only at the best places.

There
were the trade union Communists who rubbed elbows with underworld characters at
communist-financed nightclubs, and labor lawyers who were given patronage by
the Party by assignment to communist-led trade unions and now were well
established and comfortable.

But
it was shabby, serious-faced Gil Green who was for me a visible reassurance
that the Communist Party was still what I had originally thought it. His
proposal had come to me at a time when I was tired of the varying grades of
protection which the Party gave to its members, and tired of seeing the
comfortable way of life of some who were in powerful places, where they had the
support of the Party but faced none of the disadvantages of belonging to it.

Before
I left him I promised Gil that I would think seriously about his proposal. I
had personal problems to consider if I took it, for it was in a way an
irrevocable step.

For
one thing, I would be giving up a certain area of freedom, since I would be
giving up fields of work not open to an avowed Communist.

In
everything except name I was a Communist. I accepted discipline and attended
meetings. I gave a full measure of devotion to Party works, and I felt a deep
attachment and loyalty to the people in its ranks. I considered myself as part
of a group looking and driving toward the day when socialism would triumph.

Even
more significant was the fact that I had made their hates my hates. This was what
established me as a full-fledged Communist. In the long ago I had been unable
to hate anyone; I suffered desperately when someone was mistreated; I was
regarded as a peacemaker. Now, little belittle, I had acquired a whole mass of
people to hate: the groups and individuals who fought the Party.

How
it came about I cannot tell. All I know as I look back to that time is that my
mind had responded to Marxist conditioning. For it is a fact, true and
terrible, that the Party establishes such authority over its members that it
can swing their emotions now for and now against the same person or issue. It
claims such sovereignty even over conscience as to dictate when it shall hate.

Before
1935, for instance, the Party had preached hatred of John L. Lewis as a labor
dictator. No stories about him were too vile. He was accused of murder and
pillage in his march to power in the Miners Union. Suddenly, in 1936, Lewis
became the hero of the Communist Party. Again in 1940, when the Party decided
to support Roosevelt against Willkie, and John L. Lewis risked his leadership
in the CIO by calling on the unions to vote for Willkie, the Communists
screamed invective, and in private meetings Roy Hudson and William Z. Foster,
in charge of labor for the Politburo, vilified Lewis.

When
the Communists shifted their support, Lewis was dropped as president of the CIO
and Philip Murray was elected in his place. During my years in the Teachers
Union I gradually got used to these bitter expressions of hate. And since hate
begets hate, often those under attack also responded with hate. Hearing them, I
began to take sides and in the end accepted the Party’s hates as my own.

Once
at the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers in 1938 I was
assigned to attack a resolution introduced by the socialists in support of a
Fred Beals, once a Communist, and indicted for murder in the Gastonia textile
strike. He had jumped bail and escaped to Russia but he did not like life in
the Soviet Union and insisted on returning to the United States even though it meant
standing trial. The socialists were defending him and asking trades-union
support for him because the indictment had grown out of a labor dispute.

I
did not know Fred Beals, and from a purely labor point of view I should have been
sympathetic. Instead, I accepted the assignment to speak against the resolution
to help him. I had begun to adopt the hates of a group.

This
is the peculiar paradox of modern totalitarianism. This is the key to the
mental enslavement of mankind: that the individual is made into nothing, that
he operates as the physical part of what is considered a higher group
intelligence and acts at the will of that higher intelligence, that he has no
awareness of the plans the higher intelligence has for utilizing him.

When a
person conditioned by a totalitarian group talks about the right not to
incriminate himself, he really means the right not to incriminate the communist
group of which he is only a nerve end. When he talks of freedom of speech, he
means freedom for the communist group to speak as a group through the mouth of
the individual who has been selected by the higher intelligence.

The
Bill of Rights of the American Constitution was written to protect individuals against
centralized power. The Communists pervert this safeguard by first enslaving the
individual so that he becomes the marionette of the centralized power.

This
kind of conditioning had something to do with my decision to become a card-carrying
Communist. In March, 1943, I gave my consent to Gil Green’s proposal to become an
open Party leader. I took over Si Gerson’s position as legislative
representative for the New York district. Gil was pleased and insisted that I
begin the transition immediately, so I spent some time in Party headquarters
and attended all meetings.

Now
I found myself faced with two tasks: to prepare myself for my new life, and to affect
an orderly withdrawal from the Teachers Union.

For
several years I had purposely helped to bring forward new Party members for
posts of responsibility in the Teachers Union leadership. One of these was Rose
Russell, who had taught French in Thomas Jefferson High School. Rose had a fine
mind and had had some training in newspaper work.

She
had a human approach to people and problems. She was not as yet stamped into
the obvious Communist Party mold. She was personable and well-liked, and the
old guard in the Party fraction in the Union would not, I knew, dare oppose her
openly. She was my choice as successor to the post I had loved, and with the
approval of Gil and Rose Wortis we got the necessary approval by the communist
leadership of the teachers. It was then an easy matter to bring her forth as a
candidate for the Union elections of 1944.

Technically
I was to remain as the legislative representative of the Teachers Union until the
elections were held and until Rose Russell was installed publicly. The Union
gave a farewell affair inky honor in June 1944. It was a fine illustration of
the kind of unity which this Union, now a sturdy arm of the Communist Party,
was able to establish.

The
farewell party was called “A Tribute to Dear Bella.” As I read today the blurbs
on the program I can but shake my head sadly. I read there of the “inspiring
and untiring leadership in behalf of all the children ~ all the teachers ~ the
improvement in public education ~ the fight against racial intolerance.” The
chairman was my old friend, Professor Margaret Schlauch of New York University.

Telegrams
were read from scores of assemblymen and state senators, from trade-union leaders,
both communist and noncommunist, congressmen, and judges. On the platform were outstanding
leaders come to honor me, for I had won many of these people to a tolerance for
the Union by a sincere espousal of the needs of the schools. Among the people
who greeted me were Charles Hendley, Honorable Hulan Jack, then in the
Assembly, and Judge Anna Kross, whom I had grown to respect and love.

Rose
Russell presented me with a gift from the Union, a modernistic water color
which still hangs on my law-office wall. It is a good reminder, in its complete
confusion of subject matter, of the distortion of the actual, the confusion and
meaninglessness of this part of my life.

No comments:

Post a Comment

QUOTES BY JEWS

QUOTES BY JEWS

In Russia there comes the hope of the world, not as that sometimes termed of the communistic, or Bolshevik, no; but freedom,freedom! That each man will live for his fellow man! The principle has been born. It will take years for it to be crystallized, but out of Russia comes again the hope of the world. ~ Edgar Cayce, 1944, No. 3976-29

**********These pro-Israel people like pledges: they tried to force me to sign a pledge of loyalty to Israel. When I refused, it was trench warfare, hand to hand combat every day I was in the Congress, and the U.S. people never knew that I was fighting to remain independent for them. To make real peace and to find real justice. Here, they have the whole of the U.S. government making pledges to them!!! Unbelievable. ~ Cynthia McKinney, PhD**********

“The Talmud is to this day the circulating heart’s blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever laws, customs or ceremonies we observe ~ whether we are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or merely spasmodic sentimentalists ~ we follow the Talmud. It is our common law.” ~ Herman Wouk

**********

“Those who are incapable of attaining to supreme religious values include the black colored people and those who resemble them in their climates. Their nature is like the mute animals. Their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey.” ~ Maimonides

**********

“All of the anxious sighing, longing and hoping of their hearts is directed to the time when some day they would like to deal with us heathen as they dealt with the heathen in Persia at the time of Esther”. ~ Martin Luther

**********

WORDS AND WARNINGS OF WICKEDNESS

"If [Jews] are as wise as they claim to be, they will labour to make Jews American, instead of labouring to make America Jewish. The genius of the United States of America is Christian in the broadest sense, and its destiny is to remain Christian. This carries no sectarian meaning with it, but relates to a basic principle which differs from other principles in that it provides for liberty with morality, and pledges society to a code of relations based on fundamental Christian conceptions of human rights and duties." ~ Henry Ford

**********

“It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.” ~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 11

**********

The real God of the Universe does not have “Chosen” in the first place because he is perfect as we understand and predilection is a human weakness. The Jews invented the OT to fool humanity as always. The real God of the Universe does not send any body to kill, destroy his own creation, to rape, to maim, to create misery and havoc on other people. Don’t you get it? the God in the OT is a monster, is another one of the many Gods in the dessert, those sacrifices offered to God are Satanic as their name and the Jews keep offering sacrifices to their God. Last year they immolated thousands of human beings in Gaza to their God Baal, Moloch, Azazel, Satan, Lucifer. ~Isaas, TUT

**********

"I had been asked to sign a pledge for Israel when I first became a candidate for Congress and after refusing to do so my congressional career became trench warfare, hand to hand combat just to remain in the congress.

Ever since my refusal to sign that pledge for Israel the pro-Israel lobby let me know that my political net was in the hangman's noose it was the pro-Israel lobby they decided to tighten that noose." ~ Cynthia McKinney

**********

"Himself a Jew, Marx has around him, in London and France, but especially in Germany, a multitude of more or less clever, scheming, agile, speculating Jews ~ such as Jews are everywhere: commercial or banking agents, writers, politicians, reporters for newspapers of all shades, with one foot in the bank and the other in the socialist movement, and with their arses sitted upon the German daily press ~ they have taken possession of all the newspapers ~ and you can imagine what kind of sickening literature they produce. Now, this entire Jewish world, which glut a single profiteering sect, a nation of blooksuckers, a single gluttonous parasite closely and intimately interlinked not only across national borders, but across all differences of political opinion ~ this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and, at the same time, at the disposal of Rothschild.

**********

This may seem strange. What can there be in common between Communism and the largest banks? Ho-ho! The Communism of Marx seeks an enormous centralization of the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which profiteers from the labour of others, will always find a way to prevail. In reality, for the proletariat, this would be a barrack regime, under which the working men and the working women, converted into a uniform mass, would rise, fall asleep, work, and live at the beat of the drum." ~ Bakunin (1814-1876)

**********

“We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about halfway up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General (Eisenhower)...The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted and actually about three hours later lost my lunch as the result remembering it." ~ General Patton in Germany, diary entry Sept 17, 1945**********

The U.S. Congress officially recognized the Noahide Laws in legislation that was passed by both houses. Congress and the President of the U. S., George Bush, indicated in Public Law 102-14, 102nd Congress, that the United States of America was founded upon the Seven Universal Laws of Noah, and that these Laws have been the bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization. They also acknowledged that the Seven Laws of Noah are the foundation upon which civilization stands and that recent weakening of these principles threaten the fabric of civilized society, and that justified preoccupation in educating the Citizens of the U.S. of America and future generations is needed. For this purpose, this Public Law designated March 26, 1991 as Education Day.”**********

Marxism, to which all branches of Socialism necessarily adhere, was originated by Jew Karl Marx, himself of rabbinical descent and has been dominated by them from the beginning. Marx did not actually originate anything; he merely “streamlined” Talmudism for Gentile consumption.” ~ Elizabeth Dilling

**********Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can’t help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East.” ~ Fr. John Sheehan, S.J.

**********

The cruel canard ‘anti-Semitic’ does not apply for many reasons, not the least of which is the simple fact that the slanderous word itself is derived from language games for purposes of propaganda and in real world context has no validity. ~ Tom Valentine

**********

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker.

Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy.

Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot'

than the stigma of conformity.

And on issues that seem important to you,

Stand up and be counted at any cost.

~ Thomas J Watson (1874-1956)

**********

'There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. The business of the Journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.' ~ John Swinton, former Chief of Staff, The New York Times, 1953

**********

WHAT TALMUDICS THINK

Historically, Jews had always thrived in nations and empires with multicultural, pluralistic and tolerant environments, while they fared badly in strong ethnic or nationalistic societies. European Jews have always been the emblematic stranger or ‘other’. Therefore, by definition, a society where the stranger is welcome is good for the Jews, although they have not always appreciated this link. The future of European Jewry is dependent on our ability to shape a multicultural, pluralistic and diverse society. ~ Göran Rosenberg, Jewish author and journalist

**********

American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief ~ one firmly rooted in history ~ that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues. ~ Charles Silberman, Jewish writer and journalist

**********

The Jew … Judaizes … he provokes religious indifference, but he also imposes on those whose faith he destroys, his own concept of the world, of morality, and of human life. The Jews detests the spirit of the nation in the midst of which they live. ~ Bernard Lazare

**********

We will legally define the Talmud as the basis of the Israeli legal system. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

**********

"Anti-Communism is Antisemitism." ~ Jewish Voice, July ~ August 1941.

**********

We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own. ~ Maurice Samuels, You Gentiles. 1942.

**********

According to the Talmud...."...When the serpent came unto Eve, he infused filthy lust in her (but) when Israel stood on Sinai, that lust was eliminated" ~ Talmud, Abodah Zarah 22b

**********

As monstrous as it may seem, we are engaged in close combat between Israel and the Nations ~ and it can only be genocidal and total because it is about our and their identities. ~ Yitzhak Attia, Israel Magazine, April 2003

**********

"Some may call it Communism, but I call it what it is: Judaism." ~ Rabbi Stephen Weiss.

**********

It was hard for Satan alone to mislead the whole world, so he appointed prominent rabbis in different localities. ~ A Chasidic saying attributed to Nahman of Bratzlav, early 19th century

**********

It is our duty to force all mankind to accept the seven Noahide laws, and if not ~ they will be killed." ~ Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg

**********

"The Jews are called human beings, but the non-Jews are not humans. They are beasts." ~ Talmud: Baba mezia, 114b**********

"The Akum (non-Jew) is like a dog. Yes, the scripture teaches to honor the the dog more than the non-Jew." ~ Ereget Raschi Erod. 22 30**********

"Even though God created the non-Jew they are still animals in human form. It is not becoming for a Jew to be served by an animal. Therefore he will be served by animals in human form." ~ Midrasch Talpioth, p. 255, Warsaw 1855**********

"The souls of non-Jews come from impure sprits and are called pigs." ~ Jalkut Rubeni gadol 12b**********

"Although the non-Jew has the same body structure as the Jew, they compare with the Jew like a monkey to a human." ~ Schene luchoth haberith, p. 250 b**********

"If you eat with a Gentile, it is the same as eating with a dog." ~ Tosapoth, Jebamoth 94b**********

"If a Jew has a non-Jewish servant or maid who dies, one should not express sympathy to the Jew. You should tell the Jew: "God will replace 'your loss', just as if one of his oxen or asses had died." ~ Jore dea 377, 1

**********

"Sexual intercourse between Gentiles is like intercourse between animals." ~ Talmud Sanhedrin 74b

**********

"It is permitted to take the body and the life of a Gentile." ~ Sepher ikkarim III c 25**********

"It is the law to kill anyone who denies the Torah. The Christians belong to the denying ones of the Torah." ~ Coschen hamischpat 425 Hagah 425. 5**********

"Every Jew, who spills the blood of the godless (non-Jews), is doing the same as making a sacrifice to God." ~ Talmud: Bammidber raba c 21 & Jalkut 772

**********

Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. ~ Noel Ignatiev, Harvard Magazine, Sep-Oct 2002

**********

We intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed, not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.

Even if reason tells us, even shouts with all its force the very absurdity of this confrontation between the small and insignificant people of Israel [i.e., all Jewry worldwide, not just “the State of Israel”] and the rest of humanity… as absurd, as incoherent and as monstrous as it may seem, we are engaged in close combat between Israel and the Nations ~ and it can only be genocidal and total because it is about our and their identities. ~ Yitzhak Attia, Israel Magazine, April 2003

**********

Any trial based on the assumption that Jews and goyim are equal is a total travesty of justice. ~ Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, June 6, 1989:

**********

REVENGE OF THE JEWISH RABBIS OF SPAIN In 1492 CE, Chemor, chief Rabbi of Spain, wrote to the Grand Sanhedrin, which had its seat in Constantinople, for advice, when a Spanish law threatened expulsion (after the fall of Muslim rule in spain).

This was the reply:

” Beloved brethren in Moses, we have received your letter in which you tell us of the anxieties and misfortunes which you are enduring. We are pierced by as great pain to hear it as yourselves. The advice of the Grand Satraps and Rabbis is the following:

1. As for what you say that the King of Spain obliges you to become Christians: do it, since you cannot do otherwise. 2. As for what you say about the command to despoil you of your property: make your sons merchants that they may despoil, little by little, the Christians of theirs. 3. As for what you say about making attempts on your lives: make your sons doctors and apothecaries, that they may take away Christians’ lives. 4. As for what you say of their destroying your synagogues: make your sons canons and clerics in order that they may destroy their churches. [Emphasis mine] 5. As for the many other vexations you complain of: arrange that your sons become advocates and lawyers, and see that they always mix in affairs of State, that by putting Christians under your yoke you may dominate the world and be avenged on them. 6. Do not swerve from this order that we give you, because you will find by experience that, humiliated as you are, you will reach the actuality of power.

(Signed) PRINCE OF THE JEWS OF CONSTANTINOPLE.” ------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---- The reply is found in the sixteenth century Spanish book, La Silva Curiosa, by Julio-Iniguez de Medrano (Paris, Orry, 1608), on pages 156 and 157, with the following explanation: “This letter following was found in the archives of Toledo by the Hermit of Salamanca, (while) searching the ancient records of the kingdoms of Spain; and, as it is expressive and remarkable, I wish to write it here.” ~ vide, photostat facing page 80. ~ The above was quoted from Waters Flowing Eastward by Paquita de Shishmareff, pp. 73-74

**********

“[1] When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you ~ the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you ~ [2] and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy” (Deut 7:1-2).

**********

"Compassion towards the wicked is really wickedness. It is along these lines that Rabbi Levi opened his speech in honor of Purim: (Talmud, Megillah, 11a): "If you do not uproot the inhabitants of the Land, and allow them to remain - they will become thorns in your sides, and will cause trouble for you in the Land in which you dwell." (Bamidbar 33:55) The mitzvah, then of wiping out Amalek [Palestinians], actually stems from the value of compassion and kindness - compassion on all those whom Amalek threatens to exterminate. This mitzvah is an ongoing one, and valid even today. Today, too, there are those ~ driven by a deep-seeded anti-Semitism - who desperately wish to kill us. These are the people whom the Torah commanded us to obliterate, to leave no memory of them." ~ Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed

**********

Nachman Abramovic demonized Palestinian children stating: “They may look young to you, but these people are terrorists at heart. Don’t look at their deceptively innocent faces, try to think of the demons inside each of them. I am absolutely certain these people would grow to be evil terrorists if we allowed them to grow. Would you allow them to grow to kill your children or finish them off right now? Honest and moral people ought to differentiate between true humans and human animals. We do kill human animals and we do so unapologetically. Besides, who in the West is in a position to lecture us on killing human animals. After all, whose hands are clean?”

**********

"Wars are the Jews’ harvest, for with them we wipe out the Christians and get control of their gold. We have already killed 100 million of them, and the end is not yet." ~ Chief Rabbi in France, in 1859, Rabbi Reichorn

**********

"The Communist soul is the soul of Judaism. Hence it follows that, just as in the Russian revolution the triumph of Communism was the triumph of Judaism, so also in the triumph of fascism will triumph Judaism." ~ Rabbi Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews and Humanity, p. 143-144

**********

If a Jew is tempted to do evil he should go to a city where he is not known and do the evil there. ~ Moed Kattan 17a

**********

The Jewish people as a whole will become its own Messiah. It will attain world domination by the dissolution of other races, by the abolition of frontiers, the annihilation of monarchy and by the establishment of a world republic in which the Jews will everywhere exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this New World Order, the “children of Israel” will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition. The governments of the different peoples forming the world republic will fall without difficulty into the hands of the Jews. It will then be possible for the Jewish rulers to abolish private property and everywhere to make use of the resources of the state. Thus will the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled in which it is said that when the Messianic time is come, the Jews will have all the property of the whole world in their hands. ~ Baruch Levy in a letter to Karl Marx.

**********

"My opinion of Christian Zionists? They're scum, but don't tell them that. We need all the useful idiots we can get right now." ~ Bibi Netanyahu

**********

It was hard for Satan alone to mislead the whole world, so he appointed prominent rabbis in different localities. ~ A Chasidic saying attributed to Nahman of Bratzlav, early 19th century

**********

Gentiles exist only to serve Jews as slaves. Goyim were only born to serve us. Without that they have no place in the world. Only to serve the people of Israel. Why are gentiles needed? They are only here to work. They will work, they will plow. They will reap. We will sit like effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created,” Rabbi Yosef, Sha Party, Jerusalem Post, 2011

**********

"An example of the use of the Jewish code words Esau and Jacob is found in a sermon preached by Rabbi Leon Spitz during the Purim observances in 1946 (quoted here from the American Hebrew of March 1, 1946) : "Let Esau whine and wail and protest to the civilized world, and let Jacob raise his hand to fight the good fight. The anti-Semite . . . understands but one language, and he must be dealt with on his own level. The Purim Jews stood up for their lives. American Jews, too. must come to grips with our contemporary anti-Semites. We must fill our jails with anti-Semitic gangsters. We must fill our insane asylums with anti-Semitic lunatics. We must combat every alien. Jew-hater. We must Harass and prosecute our Jew-baiters to the extreme limits of the laws. We must humble and shame our anti-Semitic hoodlums to such an extent that none will wish or dare to become (their) 'fellow-travelers'.

**********

This is what Trotsky, a Jew, was preparing for the Russians for the implementation of Communism, which Marx based on the Babylonian Talmud for Gentiles:

"We should turn Her (Russia) into a desert populated with white Niggers. We will impose upon them such a tyranny that was never dreamt by the most hideous despots of the East. The peculiar trait of that tyranny is that it will be enacted from the left rather than the right and it will be red rather than white in color.

Its color will be red literally because we would spill such torrents of blood that they will pale all human losses of the capitalist wars and make the survivors shudder.

**********

Remember my children, that all the earth must belong to us Jews, and that the gentiles, being mere excrements of animals, must possess nothing. ~ Mayer Amschel Rothschild on his deathbed, 1812

**********

The largest overseas banks will cooperate with us most closely. If we win the Revolution and squash Russia, on the funeral pyres of its remains we will strengthen the power of Zionism and become a power the whole world would drop in the face of on its knees. We will show the world what real power means.

By way of terror and blood baths we will bring the Russian intelligentsia into a state of total stupor, to idiocy, to the animal state of being. So far our young men dressed in leather ~ the sons of watch repair men from Odessa and Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitza ~ oh, how beautifully, how brilliantly do they master hatred of everything Russian! With what a great delight do they physically destroy the Russian intelligentsia ~ officers, engineers, teachers, priests, generals, agronomists, academicians, writers!" ~ Secret Forces in History of Russia. U.K. Begunov 1995, p 148

**********

One of the finest things ever done by the mob was the Crucifixion of Christ. Intellectually it was a splendid gesture. But trust the mob to bungle the job. If I’d had charge of executing Christ, I’d have handled it differently. You see, what I’d have done was had him shipped to Rome and fed him to the lions. They could never have made a saviour out of mincemeat!”~ Rabbi Ben Hecht

**********

The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks.”~ Al Goldstein (publisher of Screw Magazine).

**********

"The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews ~ all of them in all different levels ~ is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle." ~ Rabbi Kook, the Elder, father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism, said

**********

"You have not begun to appreciate the depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom of not merely the latest Great War, but of every other major revolution in your history.

We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had left you alone." ~ Marclis Eli Ravage, Century Magazine February, 1926.

**********

"The United Nations is nothing but a trap-door to the Red World's immense concentration camp. We pretty much control the U.N." ~ Harold Wallace Rosenthal, Zionist, The Hidden Tyranny

**********

Very soon, every American will be required to register their biological property (that’s you and your children) in a national system designed to keep track of the people and that will operate under the ancient system of pledging. By such methodology, we can compel people to submit to our agenda, which will affect our security as a charge back for our fiat paper currency.

Every American will be forced to register or suffer being able to work and earn a living. They will be our chattels (property) and we will hold the security interest over them forever, by operation of the law merchant under the scheme of secured transactions. Americans, by unknowingly or unwittingly delivering the bills of lading (Birth Certificate) to us will be rendered bankrupt and insolvent, secured by their pledges.

They will be stripped of their rights and given a commercial value designed to make us a profit and they will be none the wiser, for not one man in a million could ever figure our plans and, if by accident one or two should figure it out, we have in our arsenal plausible deniability.

After all, this is the only logical way to fund government, by floating liens and debts to the registrants in the form of benefits and privileges. This will inevitably reap us huge profits beyond our wildest expectations and leave every American a contributor to this fraud, which we will call “Social Insurance.”

Without realizing it, every American will unknowingly be our servant, however begrudgingly. The people will become helpless and without any hope for their redemption and we will employ the high office (presidency) of our dummy corporation (USA) to foment this plot against America.” ~ American traitor, the Jew Edward Mandell House giving a very detailed outline of the New World Order plans that were to be implemented gradually over time to enslave the American people ... A PLAN THAT HAS BEEN REPEATED IN CANADA, AUSTRALIA, BRITAIN AND ELSEWHERE.

*******

"You throw a little Jewish on top of that, you got trouble. You got a bunch of wild, crazy energy.

"Sorry that doesn't sound hippie. Sorry that doesn't sound like communal jubilant fun. Sorry I'm not a Pepper. Sorry I didn't pop out of a soda-pop ad, and life is just one big fucking cabaret, because a lot of what propelled Van Halen, what compels me and propels me is precisely this element. It's fury. If you approach me with anti-Semetic preconceptions, I'm not here to re-educate. I come from a whole different school of thought. If you don't get it on the first try, fuck you.

"Every step I took on that stage was smashing some Jew-hating, lousy punk ever deeper into the deck. Every step. I jumped higher 'cause I knew there was going to be more impact when I hit those boards. And if you were even vaguely anti-Semetic, you were under my wheels, motherfucker. That's where the lyrics came from, that's where the body language came from, that's where the humor came from, and where the fuck you came from. All equally as important. You want to know the ingredients? Don't ask if you don't want to know.

"What you get from repression and what you get from hatred is fury, and fury was one of the main trigger points for the great Van Halen. What you see now is a bunch of buffoons waddling around at the family barbecue, and their wives admonishing the children saying, "Don't worry, Daddy's just had a few too many Coors Lights and he's imitating what he used to do for a living when he played music, honey."

"What's missing is the testosterone. What's missing is the fury. What's missing is the passionate convicted commitment. And I got a lot of mine from my religious background. So y'all best stop imagining the way Dr. Zorba looked, or some defenseless Hasidic Jew with a little yarmulke on his head, 'cause that ain't here for you." ~ David Lee Roth

**********

Rabbi Isaac Wise, in The Israelite of America writes, “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from beginning to end

**********

“We infiltrated the Roman Catholic Church right from the very beginning. Why do you think the Pope, the Cardinals and all the Bishops wear yarlmulkahs? (skullcaps) The white race never figures this out. A thousand years later the white race began to wake up ... we had to come up with a plan B ... so we formed the Jesuits. There was a nice boy, Ignatius Loyola. He started the Jesuits.” (Loyola was Jewish. Research/read the Jesuit Extreme Oath) Regarding the Jesuits, quoting Rabbi Finkelstein

**********

Does worship of the Talmud pervade Judaism globally? Herman Wouk, Orthodox Jew and famed author of The Cain Mutiny, affirms, “The Talmud is to this day the circulating heart’s blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever laws, customs, ceremonies we observe ~ whether we are Orthodox, Reform,Conservative, or merely spasmodic sentimentalists ~ we follow the Talmud. It is our common law.”

**********From Jews Must Liveby Samuel Roth, pg. 22. “The organ is diseased. This disease is a sort of moral gonorrhea known as Judaism, which, alas, seems to be incurable. If you have any doubts, look at any Jew ridden country in Europe. If you need to be further convinced, take a look at what is happening in the United States.”

*******

“Every synagogue we Jews build in a Christian country is a finger of scorn we point at our hosts; a sore finger we stick into their eyes, like the leering of a senile old woman who does all sorts of foul mischief before you, and feels safe in the knowledge that you will not lay hands on her for fear of contamination.” ibid., pg.

*******

Sen. Al Franken: One of the widely disseminated stories was that no Jews died in the collapse of the Trade Towers because they had received calls telling them not to go to work that day.

To tell you the truth, I got the Jew call. I had an office in the Trade Center where I used to do most of my writing. The call came from former New York mayor Ed Koch. “Al,” he told me, “don’t go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul [September 11, 2001.].”

*******

Tell me, do the evil men of this world have a bad time? They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don’t suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear us…Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear our madness instead of admiring our nobility. Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy, that we might go wild and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East, or that we might start World War Three just like that. ~ Ariel Sharon

THIS IS THE JWO/NWO

BLOOD PASSOVER

WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME

DISCLAIMER & FAIR USE NOTICE

This policy is valid from 21 August 2011

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contactbarbaralee15@hotmailcom.

This blog does not accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions. We write for our own purposes. However, we may be influenced by our background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.

The owner of this blog will never receive compensation in any way from this blog.

The owner of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.